Counterfactual impact evaluation of vocational education in Portugal

• Autor(a) principal: Cruz, Daniela Filipa Fonseca
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/11572
• topic: Vocational education; Secondary education; Counterfactual impact evaluation; Coarsened exact matching; Ensino profissional; Ensino secundário; Avaliação contrafactual de impactos; Emparelhamento exato por grupos

The Reform of the Portuguese education system, which took place in 2004, led to the introduction and rapid expansion of vocational education in public high schools. This thesis aims to assess the impacts of vocational education on students’ academic and labor market performance using a Counterfactual Impact Evaluation (CIE) approach. The dataset used in the analysis includes data for the academic years of 2008/2009, 2009/2010 and 2010/2011. For both methodological and data availability reasons, we restrict our analysis to Portuguese students without special educational needs, aged between 15 and 18 years old, who are enrolled in public high schools with tutelage of the Ministry of Education and Science, and that were enrolled in general education in the previous year (basic education). For this group of students, we find that being enrolled in vocational education has positive impacts in school performance (transition, graduation, and dropout rates) and in labor market performance (employment rate, average salary and average worked months per year). We also find that vocational education students have lower chances of proceeding to higher education. These results are robust to variations in the estimation method.