The Effect of Career and Technical Education on Human Capital Accumulation: Causal Evidence from Massachusetts

Not established from the abstract; regression discontinuity at three oversubscribed regional vocational technical high schools

Massachusetts students applying to regional vocational technical high schools, in state administrative data, with attention to students from low-income families.

OLS combined with regression discontinuity on admissions scores at three oversubscribed schools. Same local-effect limitation as Connecticut — the estimand is the marginal applicant to a selective oversubscribed vocational high school. With only three schools the school-specific-quality confound is larger than in the 16-school Connecticut system. Recorded at ABSTRACT depth: the full text could not be obtained, so bandwidth choice, covariate balance, and the statistical significance of the low-income heterogeneity are unchecked. That last point matters — the abstract hedges the low-income result as "suggestively larger" while later summaries by the same author state it flatly, and this record follows the abstract.

Participation raised the probability of on-time high-school graduation by 7 to 10 percentage points for higher-income students, with suggestively larger effects for lower-income students and for students near the admission cutoff. The paper also reports effects on professional certification attainment and on standardized test scores; the magnitudes were not recoverable at abstract depth.

Low. Admission-score cutoff among applicants; genes do not differ systematically across a narrow bandwidth.

The graduation effect replicates in Brunner, Dougherty & Ross (Connecticut, +10pp) and in Hemelt, Lenard & Paeplow (Wake County lottery, +8pp). Dougherty is an author on the Connecticut study and on the systematic review that grades both, so this is partial rather than fully independent replication.