General adult education of displaced workers in a recession: the effects on university enrollment and graduation

ABSTRACT

This article studies a sample of displaced workers during the deep 1990s recession in Sweden and estimates the effect of secondary-level adult education on tertiary-level educational attainment. Plant closures and mass layoffs are used to identify job separations unrelated to individual productivity. Results indicate a large positive effect of general adult education on displaced workers’ further investment in human capital by continuing on to university education. These findings offer some explanation of findings in previous research, i.e. slow recovery of post-treatment earnings among workers enrolled in adult education, with positive treatment effects on earnings emerging in the long run.

KEYWORDS:

• Adult education
• displaced workers
• university education
• human capital

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 There are longer-term ultimate goals such as increased productivity, closing gaps in educational attainment over generations, social mobility, and reduced inequality (e.g., OECD 2000, 56; UNESCO 2010; Skolverket 2022).

2 During the Covid-19 pandemic recession, the Swedish government has expanded the number of slots in adult education and introduced new regulations for secondary-level adult education. The latter are intended to help students with incomplete secondary education become eligible for university education (Swedish Ministry of Education 2021).

3 See, e.g., Jacobson, LaLonde, and Sullivan (1992) and Eliason and Storrie (2006) for similar sampling strategies.

4 There is no clear-cut distinction or definition in the academic literature about when youth education turns into adult education. In the Swedish educational system, an individual is eligible for publicly financed adult education from the age of 20, which is the definition used in this study.

5 At the time of displacement, 3,857 males and 4,756 females already had a three-year high school education, which meets the basic requirement for university eligibility. Still, individuals with three-year high school education may need to study additional topic-specific secondary-level courses to fulfill the requirements for some university courses or programs. Heterogeneity in effects by pre-treatment educational attainment is examined in Section 6.3.

6 The possibility of a ‘showing-up’ effect of education and a credit completion restriction are discussed in, e.g., Jacobson, LaLonde, and Sullivan (2005b).

7 These circumstances indicate that many potential sources that can lead to a biased estimation of the treatment effect are not present or are effectively addressed (e.g., Heckman, Ichimura, and Todd 1998).

8 This information is only available for males because it is based on mandatory military conscription tests. These are generally done at age 18-19.

9 Caliendo, Mahlstedt, and Mitnik (2017) found that normally unobserved characteristics, such as personal traits and attitudes, have little effect on the outcome of labor market programs if one uses comprehensive control variables that include labor market history. The relevance to evaluation of educational outcomes is not known. However, it is possible that some important unobserved heterogeneity can be correlated with observed pre-treatment labor outcomes or other observed characteristics.

10 The nearest neighbur (4) propensity score matching estimator in the t-effects package in Stata version 14 is used for estimation. The standard errors implemented in t-effects are calculated based on the formulas in Abadie and Imbens (2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Vetenskapsrådet: [Grant Number 2015-01706].