Are vocational degrees a better path to employment? In the short run.
There’s a growing backlash against the idea that every American should aspire to get a four-year, general-education college degree, a backlash driven by record-high student debt and the dismal youth employment rate. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 17 million Americans with bachelor’s degrees were doing menial work in 2010 that doesn’t require anything close to that level of education. The recession has clearly accelerated that trend. But it’s raised the argument that many young people would be better suited to enter the modern-day labor market if they were encouraged to consider vocational education as an option instead of high-falutin’ liberal arts degrees.
A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, examining 18 industrialized nations, confirms that young people who receive vocational education have a higher employment rate than those who receive general education. But, the researchers conclude, those advantages erode over time, as vocationally educated workers can’t adapt nearly as well to structural changes in the economy and labor market.
(Source:NBER)
“Vocational education has been promoted largely as a way of improving the transition from schooling to work, but it also appears to have an impact on the adaptability of workers to technological and structural change in the economy,” the paper explains. “As a result, the advantages of vocational training in smoothing entry into the labor market have to be set against disadvantages later in life.”
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