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[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0252863.].

Enhancing the role of private sector partners in education can lead to significant improvements in education service delivery. However, the realization of such benefits depends in great part on the design of the partnership between the public and private sectors, on the overall regulatory framework of the country, and on the governmental capacity to oversee and enforce its contracts with the private sector. Under the right terms, private sector participation in education can increase efficiency, choice, and access to education services, particularly for students who tend to fail in traditional education settings. Private-for-profit schools across the world are already serving a vast range of usersâ€\"from elite families to children in poor communities. Through balanced public-private partnerships (PPPs) in education, governments can leverage the specialized skills offered by private organizations as well as overcome operating restrictions such as salary scales and work rules that limit public sector responses. 'The Role and Impact of Public-Private Partnerships in Education' presents a conceptualization of the issues related to PPPs in education, a detailed review of rigorous evaluations, and guidleines on how to create successful PPPs. The book shows how this approach can facilitate service delivery, lead to additional financing, expand equitable access, and improve learning outcomes. The book also discusses the best way to set up these arrangements in practice. This information will be of particular interest to policymakers, teachers, researchers, and development practitioners.

Worldwide participation in higher education now includes one-third of the age cohort and is growing at an unprecedented rate. The tendency to rapid growth, leading towards high participation systems (HPS), has spread to most middle-income and some low-income countries. Though expansion of higher education requires threshold development of the state and the middle class, it is primarily powered not by economic growth but by the ambitions of families to advance or maintain social position. However, expansion is mostly not accompanied by more equal social access to elite institutions. The quality of mass higher education is often problematic. Societies vary in the extent of upward social mobility from low-socio-economic-status backgrounds. The paper explores the intersection between stratified social backgrounds and the stratifying structures in HPS. These differentiating structures include public/private distinctions in schooling and higher education, different fields of study, binary systems and tiered hierarchies of institutions, the vertical 'stretching' of stratification in competitive HPS, and the unequalising effects of tuition. Larger social inequalities set limits on what education can achieve. Countries with high mobility sustain a consensus about social equality, and value rigorous and autonomous systems of learning, assessment and selection in education. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).

The world is rapidly becoming more educated at higher education level. In nearly all countries with per capita GDP of more than about $5,000 per annum there is a long-term tendency to growth of participation. The worldwide Gross Tertiary Enrollment Ratio (GTER) increased from 10% in 1972 to 32% in 2012, and is now rising by 1% a year. By 2012 the GTER had reached 50% in 54 national systems, compared to 5 systems twenty years before, and there were 14 countries with a GTER of 75% or more. The tendency to high participation systems (HPS) is common to countries that vary widely in rates of economic growth, education system structures, and financing arrangements, but share the tendency to urbanization. Possible causes include state policies, economic development, aspirations for social position, credentialism, global factors, and combinations of these. The paper describes the tendency to HPS, explores the possible explanations, and begins to reflect on the implications; on the way reviewing prior discussions of growth in participation including Trow (1974), Schofer and Meyer (2005), and Baker (2011). It closes with suggestions for further investigation.

Low front-end cost and rapid accrual make Web-based surveys and enrolment in studies attractive, but participants are often self-selected with little reference to a well-defined study base. Of course, high quality studies must be internally valid (validity of inferences for the sample at hand), but Web-based enrolment reactivates discussion of external validity (generalization of within-study inferences to a target population or context) in epidemiology and clinical trials. Survey research relies on a representative sample produced by a sampling frame, prespecified sampling process and weighting that maps results to an intended population. In contrast, recent analytical epidemiology has shifted the focus away from survey-type representativity to internal validity in the sample. Against this background, it is a good time for statisticians to take stock of our role and position regarding surveys, observational research in epidemiology and clinical studies. The central issue is whether conditional effects in the sample (the study population) may be transported to desired target populations. Success depends on compatibility of causal structures in study and target populations, and will require subject matter considerations in each concrete case. Statisticians, epidemiologists and survey researchers should work together to increase understanding of these challenges and to develop improved tools to handle them.

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive picture of social selectivity in higher education in Italy by focusing on enrolment and two alternative indicators of success: retention and timely completion. The existing literature has shown that young individuals of disadvantaged backgrounds have lower enrolment probabilities and higher chances of withdrawal. This paper analyses the size and features of this cumulative disadvantage, shaping the chances of high-school leavers of eventually attaining the university degree. We analyse whether social background inequalities are stronger at enrolment or at later outcomes, and how these inequalities vary with previous schooling experience. We confirm previous evidence that disadvantaged groups with respect to enrolment are also disadvantaged on persistence, add new findings on timely completion and show that cumulative inequalities are very strong. Inequalities are strongest among students holding technical and vocational high-school qualifications and weakest among well-performing students from lyceums. In addition, we examine the role of labour market conditions and whether they explain geographical differences. Enrolment, retention and timely completion probabilities appear negatively related to local youth unemployment rates, suggesting that with poor labour market prospects, individuals lose motivation and reduce their engagement in education.

Rural students enroll in college at lower rates than nonrural students. This has been partially attributed to lower average socioeconomic status (SES) in rural areas. However, this assertion tends to ignore heterogeneity that may mask how SES shapes rural students’ college-going experiences. Utilizing a geography of opportunity framework, this study investigated how rural-nonrural differences in college-going vary based on SES. Analyses reveal that (a) rural and nonrural students in the High School Longitudinal Study (HSLS) had very similar mean SES; (b) rural status still predicted lower college enrollment rates overall, as well as four-year enrollment specifically; (c) the overall rural-nonrural enrollment gap was primarily a gap for low- and middle-SES students; and (d) there was greater socioeconomic inequality in college access in rural geographies than in nonrural geographies. These findings reinforce the fact rural students are not a monolithic group and emphasize the continued importance of SES between and within geographies. Given these findings, recommendations are provided with the intent of making college enrollment more equitable by the joint consideration of rurality and SES.

Early evidence indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic sharply reduced public school enrollment in many states. However, little is known about the underlying patterns of these declines. Using new district-level data from Massachusetts, we find that these declines were concentrated in traditional districts while charter, virtual, and vocational districts increased their enrollment. Though the enrollment declines in traditional districts were widespread, we also find that the percent declines were significantly larger in smaller districts and those serving higher concentrations of White and economically disadvantaged students. The implications for understanding the pandemic's effects on learning opportunities and the anticipated fiscal stress on public schools are discussed.