I like a data driven approach to education and view vocational education choices as an important part of the larger conversation for school choice and education reform that needs to happen in K-12 in the US. But I feel like this particular article/research may need to be performed in a more multivariate manner to be truly useful, although it does highlight the directions these explorations might take.
For example, consider this:
> Studies in the Netherlands and Sweden which look at vocational-education reforms that increased the general content in the vocational track find no benefits of additional general content on labour-market outcomes (Oosterbeek and Webbink 2007, Hall 2016).
OK, so if general content doesn’t add value to labour-market outcomes what can we say about the general content requirements that permeate about universities? They too are likely not useful.
But to discuss university education more precisely we would need to break it down from monolithic characterizations like “here are the university outcomes” to a per-degree basis. For example, is it that general education is valuable or simply that university degrees like computer science are valuable despite the deadweight of general education requirements?
Another point that needs dedicated exploration:
> In Norway, Bertrand et al. (2019) find that a similar reform also increased selection into the vocational track and thereby led to improved earnings for those induced into vocational education.
This makes sense - you try to make the vocational education more comprehensive or challenging, and you end up getting a more selective stream of students who would be more successful no matter how they were educated or certified. So isn’t that also true of universities? They’re simply the beneficiaries of a competitive system that gives them access to the highest performers, which then makes it look like a university education has value when it is really just the result of a selection advantage.
Haven't read the Netherlands/Sweden paper, but my first thought is that if their vocational education was already good and widely used, it could be the case that additional general content wasn't helpful, but that might be very different in a different country. In the U.S. I get the impression we have let our secondary vocational education programs kind of die on the vine, although community colleges have stepped into the gap in some cases. So I think we were starting from a poorer position than most of Europe, in regards vocational education.
For example, consider this:
> Studies in the Netherlands and Sweden which look at vocational-education reforms that increased the general content in the vocational track find no benefits of additional general content on labour-market outcomes (Oosterbeek and Webbink 2007, Hall 2016).
OK, so if general content doesn’t add value to labour-market outcomes what can we say about the general content requirements that permeate about universities? They too are likely not useful.
But to discuss university education more precisely we would need to break it down from monolithic characterizations like “here are the university outcomes” to a per-degree basis. For example, is it that general education is valuable or simply that university degrees like computer science are valuable despite the deadweight of general education requirements?
Another point that needs dedicated exploration:
> In Norway, Bertrand et al. (2019) find that a similar reform also increased selection into the vocational track and thereby led to improved earnings for those induced into vocational education.
This makes sense - you try to make the vocational education more comprehensive or challenging, and you end up getting a more selective stream of students who would be more successful no matter how they were educated or certified. So isn’t that also true of universities? They’re simply the beneficiaries of a competitive system that gives them access to the highest performers, which then makes it look like a university education has value when it is really just the result of a selection advantage.