Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In the past five years, there has been an increasing interest in vocational education in the UK and the US, with focus on the relatively well-functioning apprentices-oriented systems in Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. In Britain, a general restructuring of the education system for youth over age 16 is currently being considered and has included an increased focus on apprenticeships. Such reforms face challenges specifically related to the limitations of apprentice systems' ability to increase social mobility among young people from low-income families with limited educational background. This project aims to investigate the effects of limiting access to vocational training on educational attainment and employment for young people from low income families and families where the parents are skilled or unskilled. We utilize the conditions for a natural experiment to estimate these effects using administrative data from Denmark. In 2015 the Danish Ministry of education implemented as strict GPA cutoff requirement to access upper secondary vocational education and training (VET) programs. This strict cutoff and the implied restriction on access to VET among higher and lower-performing students allows us to estimate the local average treatment effect of just being eligible to participate in VET on later outcomes. Further, we leverage cross-cohort changes among higher and lower-performing students’ participation in VET to understand the compositional effects of this policy change. Initial estimates suggest that there is a strong change in VET participation induced by the GPA cutoff.