General versus vocational education: Lessons from a quasi-experiment in Croatia

Not obtained at abstract depth; pooled Croatian Labour Force Surveys 2000-2012

Croatian cohorts around the 1975/76 and 1977/78 reform that split high school into two phases, reducing tracking and extending the general curriculum for vocational students.

Regression discontinuity exploiting elementary-school entry rules crossed with reform timing. This is a DETRACKING-direction reform, which makes it the most directly relevant European source for reconciling this topic against the archive's tracking topic. Weaknesses: Labour Force Survey data, so earnings measurement is coarse, and the reform also attached vocational context to previously purely academic programmes, making it a two-sided treatment. Read at abstract depth.

The reform did NOT improve labour-market outcomes and did NOT raise enrolment in further education; on average it REDUCED the probability of having university education. For males the probability of finishing high school fell and the probability of completing university fell; for females there was no adverse effect and a small rise in some university education. The reform increased dropout. The authors conclude the observed general-vocational wage differential is mainly driven by self-selection into the type of high school. The implication for the archive's tracking topic is direct: pushing general content INTO a 16-19 vocational track is not the same lever as removing between-school selection at 10, and it can backfire.

Low for the causal estimate — entry-rule discontinuity crossed with reform timing.

Reaches the same selection verdict as Malamud & Pop-Eleches. Its dropout finding also matches Hall (2016, Sweden) as cited by Silliman & Virtanen — expanding general content inside the vocational track increases dropout.