Investigating the image deficit of vocational education and training: Occupational prestige ranking depending on the educational requirements and the skill content of occupations

Abstract

Vocational education and training (VET) often suffers from a lack of social standing among students and their families. Parents have been shown to discard vocational education because of social status maintenance considerations. How adults perceive the social prestige of occupations might therefore be key in understanding the reasons of the image deficit of VET. While the existing literature on occupational prestige ranking stresses the role of the salience in science or the training intensiveness of occupations for the perception of their social prestige, it fails at accounting for the distinct types of knowledge involved and the variety of the skill content of occupations. More precisely, differences in the salience of physical tasks and cognitive skills should be particularly relevant. We contribute to the literature by analysing a unique data set in Switzerland, a country characterized by a well-established and well-functioning vocational education and system, based on a survey of adults’ perception of the social prestige of occupations requiring academic or vocational education. Using several dimensions of the skill content of occupations, we find that the sophistication of skills performed within occupations, whether manual or intellectual, clearly improves the social prestige of the occupations investigated. However, the negative or positive effect of the previous dimensions of the skill content of occupations is small to inexistent at lower levels of educational requirements and becomes stronger as occupations become more training intensive. The desirability of occupations requiring vocational education depends therefore less on the skill content of occupations than on the level of education that is required.

Entrepreneurial Intention in Higher Vocational Education: An Empirically-Based Model With Implications for the Entrepreneurial Community

“…As the main purpose of higher vocational colleges is to cultivate skilled workers for industries, the difficulty of their entrepreneurial projects is generally low. Moreover, since the students receiving HVE have disadvantages in social capital (Abrassart & Wolter, 2020), their main motivation for starting a business is to secure their livelihood. Therefore, it is unlikely that male and female students would have fundamental differences in their attitudes toward entrepreneurship.…”

“…While empirical research has suggested that self-efficacy is the strongest individual factor, school entrepreneurship education, and government institutional forces are the main external factors that affect students’ entrepreneurial intention (Nabi et al, 2017; Saeed et al, 2015). Students in the vocational education system often have some disadvantages in social capital, family background and study habits (Abrassart & Wolter, 2020). They defined their career direction in high school, participated in entrepreneurship education to a certain extent, and developed a relationship with the job market earlier than students in the academically oriented general education system.…”

Considering Young People’s Dislocation From STEM Education: Looking Beyond the Narrow Focus of Teaching and Learning Practice Within School

“…RRR education (schools, TVET, higher education) can offer young people the opportunity to develop skills useful to their future lives (Houghton, 2019), however, school curricula in RRR areas are often detached from local contexts (Avery, 2013) and time. Although RRR students may understand STEM concepts that they have learnt outside school within their community, such learning may not necessarily align with the established school STEM curricula, particularly if there is a perceived divide between, for example, vocational and academic education (Abrassart and Wolter, 2019) and western and Aboriginal epistemologies (Nakata, 2010). The ways in which community members understand, talk about, model and practice STEM within RRR contexts have been acquired over a considerable time, beginning in early childhood, socialized within the family and continually restructured through encounters with the broader community (Deslandes et al, 2019).…”

Generational Tensions and Solidarity Within Advanced Welfare States

“…Our data do not enable enquiry into this explanation. Its relevance may be considerable, however, as there are indications that many, especially in privileged social strata, assign little esteem to, but rather look down upon, the low educated (see, for example, Abrassart & Wolter, 2020;Sandel, 2020;Skarpenes & Sakslind, 2020).…”