With the emergence of what has been described as the “knowledge-based” economy and society, national and regional policies have become much more directed at the acquisition of the skills, knowledge and dispositions needed to be productive in the workplace and to function in adult life. This policy orientation – from regional economic development authorities, labor departments, and finance and taxation units as well as education departments -- reflects an emphasis on learning over teaching and a concern with what young people and adults “should know and be able to do” regardless of where and how such capacities are acquired. From this perspective, differences in learning beyond the classroom may provide part of the explanation of variation in demonstrated capacities when levels of schooling are taken into account.
In economics, concepts and analyses of the value placed on skills and knowledge trace to the work of Nobel laureates Theodore Schultz, Milton Friedman, and Gary Becker among others. The treatment of stocks of skills and knowledge as an asset -- embodied in an individual, differentiated in ways that provide for both complementarities and substitutions as time and effort are given to market and non-market activities, and subject to obsolescence and depreciation – stands as the standard economic approach for defining, measuring and analyzing the returns to learning in school and beyond. New assessments now permit more finely grained estimates of returns to skills and knowledge that can be compared with and distinguished from conventional estimates in the economics literature of the benefits of learning, most typically through schooling and in the form of increased earnings.
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