Vocational training choices of women: public and private colleges

Abstract

This paper contrasts the profiles of women who choose to pursue vocational training in either public institutions (community colleges) or private institutions (career colleges) in Canada with particular attention given to respondents’ life‐course positions. The study employs 1998 Adult Education and Training Survey data. Correspondence analysis shows the relation between training choices of women, their individual characteristics and selected situational, dispositional, and institutional factors. The space topography determined by the correspondence between training choices and women profiles indicates that duration of training constitutes the primary institutional feature distinguishing choice. Older women who need to balance both work and family obligations tend to enroll in single courses and are attracted to the modular programming of the private colleges. In contrast, the traditional program‐based vocational training offered by community colleges is the preferred option for younger women.

Keywords:

• chain‐of‐response model
• correspondence analysis
• educational choice
• gender
• life course
• vocational public/private training

Acknowledgements

This research was partially supported through Grant # 538‐2002‐1010 (SSHRC & York University Centre for Research on Work & Society, Canada).

Notes

1. We acknowledge that 1998 AETS data are a decade old, but we maintain that the relative market share of private training has not changed significantly. More recent data (Peters 2004: 7) show some overall increase of participation in job‐related training by Canadian workers (i.e., 29% in 1997 to 35% in 2002). However, data from the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics show that enrolments in private or public colleges (only) lost ground to university participation (Li 2006) and their relative contribution is virtually unchanged.

2. Based on the stacked two‐way contingency tables of the four training choices (columns) and each influencing factor (rows), various software (e.g., SPSS, SimCA, XLSTAT) can be used to compute the coordinates of profiles along the first two principle axes of the CA map and to obtain statistical tests of the analysis. See Greenacre (1990).

3. We have not compared fields of study in this analysis but there are curriculum differences between career and community colleges, largely associated with course duration (Davey 2003).