Technical and vocational education in China: enrolment and socioeconomic status

ABSTRACT

This paper uses a Probit regression model to empirically examine the characteristics of participants in upper-secondary technical and vocational education (TVE), relative to upper-secondary academic schools. Using a nationally representative dataset from China, this study finds that compared with academic schools, participants of upper-secondary TVE tend to come from relatively disadvantaged family backgrounds, particularly in terms of parental education levels. Given TVE enrols a significant proportion (38%) of students at the upper-secondary level, these findings call for government policies aimed at improved equality in education access. This study also finds that students of secondary specialised schools, the most selective type of TVE schools, are more likely to be females. This first empirical study on TVE enrolment in China, the largest developing country, significantly adds to the literature on vocational education.

KEYWORDS:

• Vocational education
• enrolment
• socioeconomic status
• education equity
• gender
• China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This paper focuses only on the sector of school-based TVE, which is the most prevalent TVE system in the world, and the most applicable to China. There are other types of TVE including the dual apprenticeship system, such as in Germany and Switzerland where it is the more advantaged students that tend to attend.

2. Enrolment in adult upper secondary vocational schools is not included.

3. There are instances where primary schools are five years and lower-secondary schools are four years. Technical and vocational schools vary between two to three years.

4. It would be considerably easier for students from the academic track to move to the less-selective TVE track. But, students in TVE schools would have to participate in competitive entrance exams in order to enter academic schools beyond the lower-secondary level. Hence, these transitions are likely rare.

5. High pupil-to-teacher ratio does not necessarily demonstrate an advantage of secondary specialised school, as more crowded class can lead to low academic and labour market performance.

6. In trying to be consistent with western literature, ethnicity as a control variable is often included in education models in China. The Han ethnicity constitutes the majority, which is over 90% of the entire population in China. The other ethnicities are classified as minorities. Ethnicity rarely has significant impact on educational access or outcome, as minorities in China are generally given preferential treatment in formal educational settings, and are not discriminated against on educational resources (Postiglione 1999).

7. As CGSS does not include information on academic achievement, this study is not able to investigate the relationship between academic achievement and vocational education participation.

8. Concerning potential statistical overlap among the plethora of covariates in the regression model, especially those that measure similar characteristics such as family background, multi-collinearities among covariates were tested using variance inflation factors (VIF). None of VIFs was greater than 5, which suggests that the estimated coefficients and standard errors are not distorted by statistical overlap among variables that are inherently correlated. The results are available upon request.