Does tertiary vocational education beat academic education? A matching analysis of young men\u2019s earnings developments

Veronika Lukesch,Thomas Zwick

doi:10.1186/s40461-020-00104-w

Abstract

This paper shows that young men who completed an apprenticeship education plus a tertiary vocational education have considerably higher earnings during the first half of their career than those who obtained an academic education in addition to their apprenticeship education. We match employees with a tertiary vocational and an academic education based on their labour market experience and their individual and employer characteristics during their formative apprenticeship training years in which they presumably decided on their further education track. Then we compare the earnings developments in both groups of the matched sample during their tertiary education phase and after its completion for maximally 16 years after apprenticeship completion. We use linked employer-employee data of the IAB (LIAB9310).

Highlights

There is a lively debate on differences between the returns of vocational in comparison to academic or general education (Eichhorst et al 2015; Hanushek et al 2017)
This paper shows that young men who completed an apprenticeship education plus a tertiary vocational education have considerably higher earnings during the first half of their career than those who obtained an academic education in addition to their apprenticeship education
We match employees with a tertiary vocational and an academic education based on their labour market experience and their individual and employer characteristics during their formative apprenticeship training years in which they presumably decided on their further education track

Summary

Introduction

There is a lively debate on differences between the returns of vocational in comparison to academic or general education (Eichhorst et al 2015; Hanushek et al 2017). It is frequently overlooked in this debate that apprenticeship training does not equate to streaming into vocational education at the secondary level because a considerable share of former apprentices moves on to academic education in many countries (Ryan 2001). This paper compares accumulated earnings of employees with a vocational tertiary education to academics when both groups have a completed vocational training on the upper secondary level. Besides having a comparable education history, employees in both comparison groups have the ambition to add a higher education after having obtained an occupation that

Results

Discussion

Conclusion