Ventura, Guglielmo; (2023) The role of vocational education institutions in England in shaping students’ education and labour market outcomes. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Over the last decades, growing earnings gaps between university-educated workers and the rest of the workforce have been a major driver behind rising economic inequality across many advanced economies with policymakers striving to improve education and labour market opportunities among non-university-bound students. In countries with a strong emphasis on general education, such as the U.S. and the U.K., reformers have turned for inspiration to well-regarded examples of vocational education. Vocational programmes bring the promise of equipping future workers with relevant skills for the workplace, motivating students to stay in education and improving their employability and productivity. At the same time, critics worry that a lack of general skills would harm workers in the long term, especially as they are diverted from university. Rigorous economic evidence in support of this policy debate is scarce and based on the experience of selected countries with well-established traditions of vocational education and specific economic institutions. This dissertation contributes novel policy-relevant empirical evidence on the impact of vocational curricula on students' education and labour market outcomes by focusing on the English secondary education system. In England, students traditionally study in comprehensive schools until the age of 16; upon finishing compulsory education they can choose whether to enrol in an academic track, enrol in a college-based vocational track or leave education to enter the labour market. Chapter 2 uses a recently-proposed multivariate Instrumental Variable methodology whereby education choices are 'cross-instrumented' with alternative-specific distance instruments, to separately identify alternative-specific returns to vocational education on labour market outcomes. We find that the majority of marginal students are at the margin between vocational and academic education. These students see their earnings significantly reduced by age 30 as they enrol in the vocational track, especially for males, with the effect being driven by weaker wage progression rather than employment. At the margin with no post-16 education, results are more inconclusive but with some tentative evidence that vocational education brings positive benefits. Chapter 3 focuses on students within vocational education to estimate the labour market returns to starting an apprenticeship compared to obtaining a college-based vocational qualification. Combining a strategy exploiting within-school variation in future exposure to apprenticeships with a separate strategy that bounds OLS estimates, we find evidence of positive returns to apprenticeships in students' early 20s. Returns are highest for Advanced apprenticeships and in male-concentrated sectors such as Engineering with apprenticeships exacerbating the gender gap among vocational students. Finally, Chapter 4 evaluates the effectiveness of University Technical Colleges (UTCs), new hybrid autonomous secondary institutions specialised in combining general and vocational education. Combining the staggered opening of UTCs across areas with variation in students' distance to their closest UTC, we estimate the effect of enrolling in a UTC on attainment measures for two separate age groups. For the younger age group that enrol at age 14, we find strong negative effects on academic attainment in the high-stakes end-of-secondary education GCSEs exams. For the older group that enrols at the more conventional transition point of 16, effects are more positive, with no negative effect on academic achievement and higher chances of studying STEM subjects and progressing into apprenticeships. The overall findings in this dissertation caution against anticipating curricular specialisation or expanding vocational enrolment in England. They also point policymakers towards positive features of vocational education that should be reinforced. Juxtaposed to the existing evidence from other countries, these findings suggest that education systems may work interdependently with the labour market institutions they co-evolved with. More research needed to disentangle the underlying mechanisms.

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