General Versus Vocational High Schools and Labor Market Outcomes in Turkey

The main objective of this paper is to provide evidence on the extent of the wage differential between general and vocational high school graduates who do not go on to higher education. School selection is modeled with a three-way multinominal logit model. Selectivity corrected wage equations are estimated for general and vocational high school graduates. Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition of the wage differential is performed. Analysis is carried out for males and females separately. Individual level data from 1994 Household Expenditure Survey conducted by the State Institute of Statistics are used in the analysis. The main finding is that when controlled for observed characteristics and sample selection, for men, wages of vocational high school graduates are larger than those of the general high school graduates. It was not possible to make a comparison for women due to poor wage equation estimates for vocational high school female graduates. Second, lower unemployment rates are observed among vocational high school graduates than among general high school graduates for both men and women. Third, for men, private returns to vocational high schooling are higher than general high schooling. Thus, labor market outcomes in terms of private rates of return to schooling, unemployment rates and wages favor vocational high schools than general high schools.