Towards A Responsible Entrepreneurship Education and the Future of the Workforce

Highlights • PRME provides a Compass for universities to embed responsible education. • Limited information is available on the stream of African Entrepreneurship education. • Many universities are ill-equipped to develop adequate skills required for the modern job market. • This study is based on the Curricular, Co-curricular and Extra-curricular Learning Pipeline Model. Abstract This article explores how entrepreneurship education (EE) could be adopted towards improving graduate’s skills and preparing the future workforce. It adopts interviews with 30 experienced higher education academics, executives of employment and work placement agencies in Nigeria that reveals substantial benefits of adopting entrepreneurial pedagogics, critical thinking and problem-based learning (PBL). The critical question is how can EE practices be utilised in higher education to improve future workforce? Linked to the UN Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME), this study is based on the model of curricular, co-curricular and extra-curricular learning pipeline that focuses on ‘learning in the curriculum’ and ‘learning beyond the curriculum’. The model somehow links to the six domains that formed our analytical model – knowledge and cognitive learning, innovation in teaching pedagogy, change in thinking, change in attitudes, social learning and change in action

Going public? Re-thinking visibility, ethics and recognition through participatory research praxis

Recent work in human geography has articulated the principles of an emerging ‘participatory ethics’. Yet despite sustained critical examination of the participatory conditions under which geographical knowledge is produced, far less attention has addressed how a participatory ethics might unsettle the conventional ways such knowledge continues to be received, circulated, exchanged and mediated. As such, the uptake of visual methods in participatory research praxis has drawn a range of criticism for assuming visual outputs ‘tell their own stories’ and that publics might be straightforwardly engage with them. In response, this paper develops an argument for adopting an ethical stance that takes a more situated, processual account of the ways participants themselves might convene their own forms of public engagement, and manage their own conditions of becoming visible through the research process. To do so the concept of an ethics of recognition is developed, drawing attention to the inter- and intra-subjective relations that shape the public research encounter, and signalling ways that participants might navigate such conditions in pursuit of their intuitive desire to give an account of themselves to others. This ethical stance is then used to rethink questions of visibility and publicness through the conditions of reception, mediation and exchange that took place during the efforts of a London-based participatory research project to ‘go public’. Drawing in particular on the experiences of one of the project participants, we suggest how a processual and contingent understanding of public engagement informed by such an ethics of recognition might be anticipated, approached and enacted

Women's colleges and economics major choice: Evidence from Wellesley College applicants

Many observers argue that diversity in Economics and STEM fields is critical, not simply because of egalitarian goals, but because who is in a field may shape what is studied by it. If increasing the rate of majoring in mathematically-intensive fields among women is a worthy goal, then understanding whether women's colleges causally affect that choice is important. Among all admitted applicants to Wellesley College, enrollees are 7.2 percentage points (94%) more likely to receive an Economics degree than non-enrollees (a plausible lower bound given negative selection into enrollment on math skills and major preferences). Overall, 3.2 percentage points - or 44% of the difference between enrollees and non-enrollees - is explained by college exposure to female instructors and students, consistent with a wider role for women's colleges in increasing female participation in Economics

Making the (letter) grade: The incentive effects of mandatory pass/fail courses

In Fall 2014, Wellesley College began mandating pass/fail grading for courses taken by first-year, first-semester students, although instructors continued to record letter grades. We identify the causal effect of the policy on course choice and performance, using a regressiondiscontinuity-in-time design. Students shifted to lower-grading STEM courses in the first semester, but did not increase their engagement with STEM in later semesters. Letter grades of first-semester students declined by 0.13 grade points, or 23% of a standard deviation. We evaluate causal channels of the grade effect-including sorting into lower-grading STEM courses and declining instructional quality-and conclude that the effect is consistent with declining student effort

The effects of quantitative skills training on college outcomes and peers

This paper estimates the causal effect of taking a course in quantitative reasoning on students' academic performance and classroom peer-group composition at a liberal arts college. To identify effects, the paper compares the outcomes of otherwise similar students who barely passed a baseline quantitative skills assessment (not taking the course) with students who barely failed (taking the course). The regression-discontinuity estimates show little impact on academic outcomes for student close to the passing cutoff, including grades on subsequent courses with quantitative content, but we are unable to distinguish small from zero effects. Exogenous course assignment does affect the composition of students' classroom peer groups in subsequent years. The effects can only be generalized to students in the vicinity of the passing threshold (but not students with much worse quantitative skills at the baseline). We discuss implications for research and policy on remediation.College Regression discontinuity Quantitative skills Remedial Peer groups

Regulation of the Hippo pathway and implications for anticancer drug development

Research in the past decade has revealed key components of the Hippo tumor suppressor pathway and its critical role in organ size regulation and tumorigenesis. Recent progress has identified a wide range of upstream factors that control the Hippo pathway, which include cell-cell contact, various diffusible signals, and cognate receptors. Dysregulation of the Hippo pathway, caused by gene mutation or aberrant expression, promotes cell proliferation and tumorigenesis. Here, we discuss the current state of Hippo pathway research, primarily focusing on upstream regulators and protein-protein interactions as potential therapeutic targets. Consideration of pharmacological intervention of the Hippo pathway may provide novel avenues for future therapeutic treatment of human diseases, particularly in cancer