Returns to Vocational Education and Training (VET) in Times of Crises: A Stepping Stone or a Trap for Career Advancement?

VET is often acknowledged as being a very efficient stepping stone to integrate the labor market: it prevents unemployment risks and insures good returns to first employment. However, while benefits of VET are undeniable from a short-term perspective, they remain more questionable from a longer-term stance: it would seem that, from a longer-term perspective, graduates of VET face higher unemployment risk and lower career advancement opportunities than their counterparts with general education. Yet, this under-studied aspect is crucial as the political response to the recent economic crisis has been to promote vocationally oriented education rather than general education (see Europe 2020 strategy).

Therefore, I will investigate the following research questions: Does VET offers better – short terms and long terms – returns to education than other accademically oriented educational levels? How these returns vary according to institutional arrangements and according to economic context? I will focus on four countries who depict different educational systems, namely France, Germany, Switzerland and the United-Kingdom to investigate these questions. In order to gain insights as regard to the evolution of returns to VET, I will analyse the evolution of career prospects of each cohort of VET graduates using labour force survey data on the longest-time frame as possible. In other words, the analysis will consist in analysing returns to VET in each countries at an aggregated level to see whether we can observe cohort and/or period effects.

I expect important cross-national differences in returns to VET, with higher returns to VET in countries with vocationally oriented educational systems (Germany and Switzerland) and lower returns in more academically oriented ones (France and UK). I furthermore expect overall long-term returns to VET to have decreased since the emergence of repeated economic crises.