The Economics of Youth Training in the United States
考察美国青年离校后培训的现状，总结私人部门培训投资的回报率证据，并讨论改革培训方式的政策选项，尤其关注非大学学历青年如何获得高技能高工资工作。
Investment in human capital is a critical component in the determinants of wages and wage growth of workers, firm productivity, and overall economic growth and competitiveness. Ever since the pathbreaking work of Becker (I964) and Mincer (I974) economists have sought to examine the impact of human capital investments on these three areas. While there has been much progress in the empirical analysis of the returns to schooling and government training programmes, there has been relatively little research on the returns to post-school training provided by the private sector. Yet this is the area of investment that is the primary focus of much of the current policy discussion on how to increase productivity and competitiveness. In the past, in the United States, as in many other industrialised countries, workers without a university degree could look forward to a good paying job with moderate skills requirements in the manufacturing sector. The required skills in the United States could be obtained through a system of informal 'learning-by-doing'. However, as technologies changed and new work organisations were designed to increase productivity, the need for crossfunctional competencies and problem-solving increased, as did the demand for multi-skilled workers. Leaner work organisations require workers to have a broader range of skills. In addition, technological change means that many workers, even if they remain with the same employer, will not be working in the same jobs ten years from now. So work-force requirements are changing: workers must be retrainable and adaptable to new technologies and work organisations. The problem is how do new entrants, especially those without a university degree, make sure that they have the training to obtain a high skill/high wage job as opposed to a low skill/low wage job when they enter the labour market? In addition, how will they be prepared to 'learn how to learn' so that as their job requirements change, they change with them rather than out of them? This paper examines the current structure of post-school training of young workers in the United States, summarises new empirical evidence on the rates of return to various types of private sector training investments, and describes some of the options being proposed in the United States to reform the way in which post-school training takes place, especially for young workers.