General versus Vocational High Schools and Labor Market Outcomes in Turkey

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to provide evidence on the extent of wage differential between general and vocational high school graduates who do not go on to higher education. School selection is modeled with a three way multinominal logit model. Selectivity corrected wage equations are estimated for general and vocational high school graduates. Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition of the wage differential is performed. Analysis is carried out for men and women separately. Individual level data from 1994 household Expenditure Survey conducted by the State Institute of Statistics are used in the analysis. The main finding is that when controlled for observed characteristics and sample selection, for men, the wages of the vocational high school graduates are larger than that of the general high school graduates. It was not possible to make a comparison for women due to poor wage equation estimates for the vocational high school graduate women. Second, lower unemployment rates are observed among vocational high school graduates than among general high school graduates. Third, for men private returns to vocational high schooling are higher than to general high schooling. Thus, labor market outcomes in terms of private rates of return to schooling, unemployment rates and wages favor vocational high schools than general high schools.