Secondary Education Systems and the General Skills of Less- and Intermediate-educated Adults

Heisig, Jan; Solga, Heike

doi:10.1177/0038040715588603

Cited by 56 publications

(76 citation statements)

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“…For instance, Germany is a country with a credentialist labor market and a vocationally oriented education system. Less credentialist labor markets might allow for even more undereducation among immigrant minorities, but then again Germany's vocational orientation furthers skills among the less educated in international comparison (Heisig and Solga, 2015). Careful theorizing along such lines is needed and would limit inappropriate generalizations to other contexts and populations.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Income Advantages of Poorly Qualified Immigrant Minorities: Why School Dropouts of Turkish Origin Earn More in Germany

2015

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We investigate an often overlooked implication of the signaling model of statistical discrimination: if immigrant minorities' educational qualifications carry less signaling power, poorly-qualified minority members should experience positive statistical discrimination. We argue that the lower signaling power stems from disadvantages associated with insufficient language skills and lack of supportive parental resources, which prevent minority students from achieving those educational qualifications that would reflect their high motivation and ambition. Yet, if education counts less, so does its lack. Using data from the German Microcensus, we compare log hourly personal income of 1.5 th and 2 nd generation Spätaussiedler and persons of Turkish origin to that of native Germans. Using (semi-parametric) generalized additive models, we find solid support for our claim that poorly-qualified persons of Turkish origin experience income advantages; they frequently work in jobs for which they are underqualified. Once different frequencies of over-and undereducation are taken into account, no ethnic differences in educational returns remain. Our results extend to other comparable immigrant groups in Germany.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Income Advantages of Poorly Qualified Immigrant Minorities: Why School Dropouts of Turkish Origin Earn More in Germany

2015

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“…Following conventions from large-scale multi-national studies we distinguish three levels (high, intermediate, and low) to describe our sample (OECD 2013c;Heisig and Solga 2015).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who likes to learn new things: measuring adult motivation to learn with PIAAC data from 21 countries

Gorges

Maehler

Koch

et al. 2016

Large-scale Assess Educ

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“…Importantly, the human capital story also suggests a straightforward explanation for crossnational variation in the labor market disadvantage of the less educated: As skills levels of less-educated adults vary across countries (e.g., because of differences in education systems Heisig and Solga 2015;Park and Kyei 2011), accounting for individual-level differences in general skills should reduce cross-national variation in the labor market disadvantage of lesseducated adults (hypothesis 2).…”

Section: Theoretical Considerations and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In constructing the measures, we closely follow Heisig and Solga's (2015) and especially Heisig's (2016) analyses of the relationship between secondary education systems and skills transparency.…”

Section: Country-level Predictorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In other words, these institutional features strengthen the link between formal qualifications and actual skills (Andersen and Van de Werfhorst 2010). So far, however, there is very little direct evidence that country differences in returns to educational degrees are due to differences in skills transparency, although Heisig and Solga's (2015) recent finding that external differentiation raises the skills differential between adults with low and intermediate formal qualifications is consistent with this interpretation. Moreover, even if one accepts the premise that education systems are linked to skills transparency in the hypothesized ways, the lack of good measures of individual skills has prevented previous studies from empirically disentangling the human capital and signaling explanations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

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Human capital or signaling? Differences in skills distributions and the labor market disadvantage of less-educated adults across 21 countries

Heisig¹,

Gesthuizen²,

Solga³

2016

Preprint

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Less-educated adults bear the highest risk of labor market marginalization in all advanced economies, but the extent of their disadvantage differs considerably across countries.Exploiting unique data on the actual skills of adults from PIAAC 2011/12, we examine two prominent explanations for this cross-country variation. Human capital theory suggests that the marginalization of less-educated individuals reflects a lack of skills. The signaling explanation emphasizes the role of educational credentials as easy-to-observe proxies for skills and productivity. It suggests that the skills distribution of educational groups can affect their labor market position beyond any individual-level effect of skills by influencing the signaling value or "skills transparency" of educational credentials. Applying a two-step regression approach to a sample of 48,033 adults in 21 countries, we find support for both explanations. Consistent with human capital theory, literacy and numeracy skills are positively related to occupational status at the individual level and partly account for crossnational differences in the labor market disadvantage of less-educated adults. Yet, crosscountry variation remains considerable even after controlling for skills and further key observables. Consistent with the signaling account, country-level regressions show that the remaining variation is related to two direct measures of skills transparency: the aggregate skills differential between less-and intermediate-educated adults and the internal homogeneity of these groups. We also find that the labor market disadvantage of lesseducated adults increases with the vocational orientation of secondary education, presumably reflecting individual-and aggregate-level effects of occupation-specific skills, which were not assessed in PIAAC.2

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Secondary Education Systems and the General Skills of Less- and Intermediate-educated Adults

Cited by 56 publications

References 32 publications

Income Advantages of Poorly Qualified Immigrant Minorities: Why School Dropouts of Turkish Origin Earn More in Germany

Income Advantages of Poorly Qualified Immigrant Minorities: Why School Dropouts of Turkish Origin Earn More in Germany

Who likes to learn new things: measuring adult motivation to learn with PIAAC data from 21 countries

Human capital or signaling? Differences in skills distributions and the labor market disadvantage of less-educated adults across 21 countries

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