Nothing as practical as a good theory?: returns to vocational secondary education in early career years

• Autor(a) principal: Ferreira, Ana Catarina Araújo
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/30771
• topic: Vocational education; Returns; Earnings; Wage inequality; Labour market transition

Portugal has recently extended compulsory schooling until the age of eighteen, in an attempt to increase educational levels among the working population. This thought coincided with the strong resurgence of vocationally oriented secondary education courses, which now represent almost half of the new student cohorts. A much larger number of high school graduates therefore face the choice to start working immediately after compulsory education and to choose a more vocational or more general approach. This dissertation estimates and breaks down the wage returns associated with choosing a more or less vocational path in secondary education. We analysed, in particular, the salaries associated with educational trajectories oriented towards the vocational and those of more general orientation during the first five years of employment. After carefully describing the institutional changes associated with the vocational reorientation of the educational system since 1983, we use a data set linked between employer-employee that collects information regarding all private and non-profit employees recently graduated through one of these two education pathways. In line with the debate on the advantages or dangers of early specialization, our results suggest that, controlling for an effect of other variables, a vocational course is associated with lower wages (1.21%) at the beginning of the career which show a more accelerated growth trend (0.37%) with higher levels of experience. The results also show, however, that there is a significant level of wage inequality between men and women (with women earning 7.37% less than men) and that this difference is growing with higher levels of experience.