General versus vocational education: Lessons from a quasi-experiment in Croatia

Žilić, Ivan

doi:10.1016/j.econedurev.2017.10.009

Cited by 40 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Malamud and Pop-Eleches (2011) study a reform in Romania in 1973 that shifted a large number of students out of vocational and into general education; using a regression discontinuity design, they find no significant differences in university completion, employment, or earnings between the post-and pre-reform cohorts. Zilic (2018) studies the effect of a high school reform in Croatia in the mid-1970s that reduced tracking in high school by forcing all students to attend two years of general curriculum before entering a vocational school; using a regression discontinuity design, he finds that the reform reduced high school and university completion rates among males but had no adverse effects on females. Finally, Hall (2012Hall ( , 2016 studies the pilot phase of a major education reform conducted in Sweden in 1991 that increased the academic content of the vocational tracks in upper secondary and gave students graduating from these vocational tracks basic eligibility for university studies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving Educational Pathways to Social Mobility: Evidence from Norway’s “Reform 94”

Bertrand¹,

Mogstad²,

Mountjoy³

2019

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High school vocational education has a controversial history in the United States, largely due to a perceived tradeoff between teaching readily deployable occupational skills versus shunting mostly disadvantaged students away from the educational and career flexibility afforded by general academic courses. We study the effects of a nationwide high school reform in Norway that aimed to move beyond this tradeoff. Reform 94, implemented in one step in the fall of 1994, integrated more general education into the vocational track, offered vocational students a pathway to college through a supplementary semester of academic courses, and sought to improve the quality of the vocational track through greater access to apprenticeships. We identify the impacts of the reform through a difference-indiscontinuity research design, comparing students born just before and after the reform's birthdate eligibility cutoff to students born around the same cutoff in placebo years. Linking multiple administrative registries covering the entire Norwegian population, we find that the reform substantially increased initial enrollment in the vocational track, but with different subsequent outcomes for different groups. More men complete the vocational track at the expense of academic diplomas, but this has no detectable impact on college-going and leads to reduced criminal activity and higher earnings in adulthood, especially among disadvantaged men. For disadvantaged women, the initial surge in vocational enrollment leads to fewer high school dropouts and more vocational degrees with the college-prep supplement, and hence an increase in the share of college-eligible women; however, this translates into only small and insignificant increases in college completion and adult earnings. We show that men overwhelmingly pursue vocational education in higher-paying skilled trade fields, while women almost exclusively pursue vocational education in lower-paying service-based fields, which helps in interpreting some of these results. Overall, the reform succeeded at improving social mobility, particularly among men, but it somewhat exacerbated the gender gap in adult earnings.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving Educational Pathways to Social Mobility: Evidence from Norway’s “Reform 94”

Bertrand¹,

Mogstad²,

Mountjoy³

2019

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“…Since students selfselect into technical education, identifying causal effects of technical education during high school poses a methodological challenge. Very few papers have credibly identified the effect of technical education and, in most cases, these papers have been centered on developed country experiences (e.g., Kemple and Snipes, 2000;Dougherty, 2018;Neild et al, 2015;Hall, 2012;Zilic, 2018).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite generally finding no effect on academic achievement, most relevant literature shows that technical education is successful at reducing dropouts. Experimental and quasi-experimental work reports that students enrolled in technical education have a lower dropout rate compared to the control group in the US (Kemple and Snipes, 2000) and in Sweden (Hall, 2012), and show an increase in male dropout when the general curriculum was extended in the technical track in Croatia (Zilic, 2018). Descriptive research or analyses using matching methods, which are likely to be biased towards more dropouts, show mixed effect of technical education on dropouts in the US (Plank, 2001;Agidini and Deke, 2004;Loyalka et al;Pittman, 1991).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Literature on the effect of technical education during high school on labor market outcomes is significantly more extensive, although mostly descriptive, as it does not address the self-selection of students into vocational education(Kreisman and Stange, 2017;Bishop and Mane, 2004;Kang and Bishop, 1986;Gustman and Steinmeier, 1982, Neuman andZiderman, 1991; Ziderman, 2003, Moenjak andWorswick, 2003;Polidano and Tabasso, 2014). Causal estimates, obtained with methodologies that address the self-selection bias, show positive or no effect of technical education on wages and the probability of being employed(Kemple and Willner, 2008;Malamud and Pop-Eleches, 2010;Zilic (2018),Chen, 2009;Bucarey and Urzúa, 2013). Lastly, technical high school seems to have a positive effect on time employed, as shown descriptively byGustman y Steinmeier (1982) andKang and Bishop (1986) for the US, and for Chile by Bucarey and Urzúa (2013) using instrumental variables.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Does Technical Education Improve Academic Outcomes?: Evidence from Brazil

Elacqua¹,

Prada²,

Navarro-Palau³

et al. 2019

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work is licensed under a Creative Commons IGO 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC-IGO BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo/ legalcode) and may be reproduced with attribution to the IDB and for any non-commercial purpose, as provided below. No derivative work is allowed.Any dispute related to the use of the works of the IDB that cannot be settled amicably shall be submitted to arbitration pursuant to the UNCITRAL rules. The use of the IDB's name for any purpose other than for attribution, and the use of IDB's logo shall be subject to a separate written license agreement between the IDB and the user and is not authorized as part of this CC-IGO license. Abstract:Despite the renewed interest in technical education, only a handful of studies analyze its effect on academic outcomes. In this paper we apply a regression discontinuity design to oversubscribed technical high school tracks in Pernambuco, Brazil, to identify the impact of technical education during high school on student academic outcomes. We find that students above the technical high school admission exam score cutoff drop out less from high school and have Math and Portuguese standardized test scores over 0.1 standard deviations higher than students below the cutoff. We also find that students above the cutoff were more likely to attend schools offering a longer school day and better school, teacher, and peer characteristics. Comparing technical high schools with academic schools with similar characteristics, we find no differences in terms of achievement but significantly lower dropout rates. This evidence suggests that the estimated effect of having the opportunity to enroll in technical high schools on student achievement may be driven by the school characteristics while the nature of the instructional content seems to be effective in reducing dropout rates during high school.

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“…Vocational high school (VHS) is an education unit that is organized in the formal education pathway for secondary education, and is in a vocational group. VHS has a dual vocational education system that is an education system that is oriented to work skills and entrepreneurial skills in the business world or the world of industry by adjusting the characteristics of competencies of interest [1], [2]. Therefore, students who should have graduated at the VHS level have readiness as workers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%