What Works in the Long Run? Apprenticeships or General Education?
Inside Higher Ed story “Importing Apprenticeships” cites a JHR paper that investigates the payoffs and tradeoffs of more job focused education.
“In a 2015 study published in The Journal of Human Resources, Hanushek and three co-authors looked at labor outcomes across 11 countries and found evidence of a “clear trade-off” between short-term and long-term labor outcomes for workers with general and vocational education, with that pattern being “most pronounced” in countries with strong apprenticeship systems.” The paper finds immediate gains to workers who pursue vocational education, but general education appears to pay off better in the long run.
See “General Education, Vocational Education, and Labor-Market Outcomes over the Lifecycle,” for the study by Eric A. Hanushek, Guido Schwerdt, Ludger Woessmann, and Lei Zhang.
