Looks at the pros and cons of technical education.
Looks at vocational education in Britain.
This paper aims at analyzing main features of the German vocational education. It builds on a simple model of firm specific human capital accumulation in case of learning by doing. A main result is a positive effect of government financed schooling on creating learning by doing jobs. This finding relies on simple strategic arguments and does not depend on long term labor contracts or any cross productivity effects between learning inside and outside the firm.
Using data from three longitudinal surveys of American high school students, I show that vocational courses helped non-college-bound students to start their work life more successfully. A comparison of the returns to academic and vocational course work for non-college-bound students who graduated in 1972, 1980 and 1992 finds that the short and medium term payoffs to vocational courses rose substantially between 1972 and 1980 and remained high in 1992. Holding a host of variables constant, academic course work had much smaller labour market payoffs than vocational course work. These findings contradict the often repeated claim that employers now seek workers with a good general education and are happy to teach the occupation specific skills necessary to do the job. High school students who do not plan to attend college full-time would be well advised to start studying a well paying occupation before they complete high school.
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