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High-quality longitudinal data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study gives us the opportunity to investigate whether participation in adult education (AE) fosters volunteering, and whether this depends on the volume of AE, its content, or on the qualification obtained with it. From a public enlightenment perspective, we would only expect to find an effect if the content of AE relates to social issues and domains relevant for volunteering. Yet theories emphasizing AE as a place of encounter and an activity that strengthens self-confidence would expect a positive effect regardless of the content but depending on the volume and the obtained qualification. Our results from a person fixed-effects model reveal a significant and positive effect of participation in AE on volunteering in general, while volume, content, and obtained qualifications appear to make no difference. These findings provisionally suggest that social interactions and self-perceptions explain civic returns to AE.

The increasing demand for integration courses in Germany (especially due to the crisis-induced migration of refugees) has raised the question in research and practice of how this change affects the supply and participation of continuing education providers. To address this issue, the present study explores the impact of increasing integration course counts and participation on regular course counts and participation in German state-funded public adult education centers (Volkshochschulen; VHS), which are the main providers of integration courses. For this, we apply longitudinal fixed effects analyses to the VHS statistics. Controlling for VHS-specific trends, we find that on average, an increase in integration course counts slightly decreases regular course counts. Regarding participation, we observe the opposite: Increasing participation in integration courses leads to a small increase in participation in regular courses.

Informal learning, the self-initiated acquisition of knowledge, takes a central position in political and scientific debates on skill formation. Human capital theory argues that informal learning increases skills and thereby will positively affect returns in the labour market. Signalling and closure theories do not expect returns to informal learning, as informal learning does not result in a formal degree. So far only a few studies have empirically investigated how informal learning affects labour market outcomes, all of them applying a cross-sectional design. By using the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), we model the returns to three forms of informal learning in person fixed-effects models, thereby reducing problems of selection into informal learning. We find that up to 33 per cent of the respondents engage in at least one form of professional purpose informal learning. While participation is high, the effects on labour market returns are negligible. We find a very small positive effect of one of the three types of informal learning on employment, and we find no effect of informal learning on wages.