OECD’s education lighthouse: social network as response to crisis

The OECD recently held a conference in Copenhagen called "Higher Education at a Time of Crisis: Challenges and Opportunities"


OECD’s response includes setting up a collaborative space called: education lighthouse, with the intention of providing:

• Up-to-the-minute information, evidence and analysis on the impact of the crisis on education, with concrete examples of how governments and institutions in different countries are coping with the crisis.


• Information on high priority issues such as education budgets, education in stimulus packages, how unemployment affects motivation and learning attitudes … and much more.
  

"Anders Sørensen (Professor, Department of Economics, CBS, Denmark) opened his presentation by discussing the length and the extent of the current economic crisis. He pointed out that we are amidst a severe crisis, which is everything we’ve seen before - all at once. Many countries will experience negative growth rates of GDP until late 2010 and there will be increasing unemployment. The question is, therefore, how are new graduates hit by the crisis?
Even though unemployment rates are increasing dramatically, the return to education for the moment seems to be constant. However, he stressed that schooling only pays off in combination with wage experience, so that new graduates should go for wage employment rather than entrepreneurship. Sørensen’s main conclusion was that "education pays!"

(from the document Impacts of the crisis on Higher Education Institutions)

The presentations are available online but you have to register with OECD to be able to join the network.