General Education, Vocational Education, and Labor-Market Outcomes over the Lifecycle*

By Eric A. Hanushek, Guido Schwerdt, Ludger Woessmann, Lei Zhang. The Journal of human resources, 2011

683 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Policy proposals promoting vocational education focus on the school-to-work transition. But with technological change, gains in youth employment may be offset by less adaptability and diminished employment later in life. To test for this tradeoff, we employ a difference-in-differences approach that compares employment rates across different ages for people with general and vocational education. Using microdata for 11 countries from IALS, we find strong and robust support for such a tradeoff, especially in countries emphasizing apprenticeship programs. German Microcensus data and Austrian administrative data confirm the results for within-occupational-group analysis and for exogenous variation from plant closures, respectively.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f0b5e45526f5a937582c3c79d430868b45421566

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In Economics and Econometrics

Citations in the corpus

School-to-Work Linkages, Educational Mismatches, and Labor Market Outcomes (2019, background): “In doing so, we reevaluate findings from existing research showing workers from countries with strong vocational educational systems lack the flexible training to adjust to changing technology and are therefore at higher risk for unemployment later in their careers (Hanushek et al. 2017).”
Labor Market Returns to Sub-Baccalaureate Credentials (2015, background): “See Hanushek, Woessmann, and Zhang (2011) for some discussion of the relative labor market advantages of vocational and general education programs over time.”
School-to-Work Linkages in the United States, Germany, and France1 (2017, background): “As noted earlier, Hanushek et al. (2011) argue that undifferentiated systems like that of the United States may provide greater labor market flexibility and therefore better employment chances later in life than systems that emphasize vocational qualifications.”
Youth unemployment and active labor market policies in Europe (2016, background): “…to experience a faster entry into the labor market than youth entering the labor market after participating in mostly general education (Ryan, 2001; Hanushek, Woessmann, and Zhang, 2011; Neuman and Ziderman, 1999; Winkelmann, 1996; Riphahn and Zibrowius, 2015).5 The reason for this faster entry…”
Five Characteristics of Youth Unemployment in Europe (2015, background): “Most recently, Hanushek, Woessmann, and Zhang (2011) adopt a life cycle approach to analyzing employment differences of general and vocational schooling over the course of individuals’ working life.”
Vocational Education and Employment over the Life Cycle (2016, background): “9 Both variables display different aspects of the vocational orientation of an educational system that are deemed to be important by earlier studies (Bol and Van de Werfhorst 2013; Breen 2005; Hanushek et al. 2016).”
A Road Map to Vocational Education and Training in Industrialized Countries (2015, background): “While some studies so far support the conjecture that general education still provides a more solid base for such adjustments (hanushek et al. 2011), others suggest that vocational training is better than pure on-the-job (unskilled) training (Adda et al.”