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By Melanie Breault. To tackle the unemployment crisis in Europe, memoranda has been signed between Germany and Greece, Italy, Latvia, Portugal, Slovakia, and Spain to set up vocational education systems. Is it time for the U.S. to visit the idea of vocational education too?
Germany and Austria — the two European countries with the lowest youth unemployment rates — have dual-education systems where they combine part-time apprenticeships with formal schooling. The way it works is: Any students not interested in, or not qualified for, university can sign up for a program where they spend part of the week working for a firm that pays them one third of a trained workers salary, and the other half of the week learning the theory and practice of their interested occupation as well as other general subjects. Read more...

It still pays to earn a college degree. That is, if you get the right one. Georgetown University published a report Wednesday that looked into this dilemma.
"The labor market demands more specialization. So, the game has changed," says Anthony Carnevale, the report's co-author and director of Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce.
Carnevale says students probably aren't choosing the right degrees because they haven't been given the right guidance.
Chasing The Elusive American Dream
He says that given slow hiring in the current economy, some industries that sound promising aren't — like biomedical engineering. That's what Sandra Mantilla majored in at Florida International University. Read more...