Vocational and Career Tech Education in American High Schools: The Value of Depth Over Breadth

NLSY97 transcript and earnings sample; exact n not obtained

US high-school students in the NLSY97 cohort, with full course transcripts and early-career earnings.

Selection-on-observables with a structural curriculum-choice model, plus an instrumental-variables check using variation in state graduation requirements. This is the only source in the topic that speaks to ORDINARY CTE course-taking inside comprehensive high schools — which is what most American CTE actually is — but it is not a credible causal design for the wage return: the instrument is weak and the main estimates are conditional on observables. Its most defensible contribution is descriptive. Read at abstract depth.

Students positively sort INTO vocational coursework — the belief that low-ability students are funnelled into CTE is, in the authors' words, unlikely true. Earnings are higher for students taking more upper-level vocational courses, at nearly a 2% wage premium per additional year of upper-level coursework, concentrated in transportation and industry (construction trades, mechanics and repair, production), business and management, and health care. There is NO gain from introductory vocational courses. Little evidence that vocational coursework reduces college graduation, though suggestive evidence it deters the marginal college-goer — who was least likely to graduate anyway.

HIGH. The paper's own headline finding is positive selection into vocational coursework, which is a direct statement that the observational comparison is confounded by the traits that drive course choice. The wage premium should be read as an upper bound.

The depth-versus-breadth distinction has not been independently replicated with a causal design.