After finishing compulsory education, what path do I choose: academic-related or vocational training-related studies?

ABSTRACT

The professional trajectory of population with vocational education and training (VET) continues to be a central issue. Despite the fact that firms more and more demand workers with medium qualification, a low share of population follows this educational path. This paper shows evidence of possible reasons by analysing the differences in terms of earnings that distinguish these individuals from others with different education within the labour market.

KEYWORDS:

• Vocational education and training
• university education
• compulsory studies
• earnings gap
• cohort perspective

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I21
• I20
• J31

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13504851.2022.2082366.

Notes

¹ Earnings gap between university and high-school graduates and between VET and high-school graduates is also analysed.

² In Supplementary Annexe, Table 1A displays the corresponding coefficients.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Oviedo [PAPI-19-PF-02] and Ministerio de Econom’ía e Industria [MCI-21-PID2020-115183RB-C21].