| Abstract: |
Mainstream secondary education in Flanders (i.e. the Dutch speaking part of
Belgium) is divided into four major education forms : general education,
technical education, vocational education and arts education. The focus of
this paper is on pupils graduation from technical and vocational education.
Although technical education is more oriented towards higher education and
vocational education is more labor market oriented, both degrees allow access
to higher education and should also prepare students to start working. Despite
the distinction between technical and vocational education, a number of
similar study fields coexist both in the technical and the vocational form. A
first aim of this paper is to investigate whether students from similar study
fields in technical and vocational education do have different transition
probabilities from secondary to higher education. In addition we will quantify
the impact of individual, school and local (labor market) characteristics on
the probability of continuing their educational career after having obtained a
degree in secondary education. International literature has been examining the
impact of determinants of the transition from secondary to higher education.
Four main categories of determinants have been distinguished. First,
individual characteristics e.g. gender, age, ability and nationality are found
to significantly influence the choice of field of study (Ayalon and Yogev,
2005, Benito and Alegre, 2012). Second, the transition choice is found to be
highly influenced by family background characteristics such as type of family,
number of siblings, education of the parents and family income (Van de
Werfhorst et al., 2001, Van de Werfhorst et al., 2003, Ayalon and Yogev, 2005,
Nguyen and Taylor, 2003). Third, Nguyen and Taylor (2003) and Benito and
Alegre (2012) found the impact of certain secondary school characteristics
(e.g. percentage of students from families with a low educational level and
school type) to have a significant impact on the transition choices after
secondary education. Finally, regional characteristics such as geographic
location have been found to play a part in educational achievement and the
transition from secondary to tertiary education. For example, higher
unemployment levels in the region you live can make you choose for programmes
that lead to higher job security (Ayalon and Yogev, 2005, Nguyen and Taylor,
2003, Kauppinen, 2008). Methodologically, the most frequently used techniques
to investigate the impact of student, family and school characteristics on
transition probabilities are the estimation of (multinomial) probit or logit
models (Breen and Jonsson 2000; Lucas 2001; Ayalon and Yogev 2005; Benito and
Alegre 2012). Since pupils are nested in schools, the multilevel structure of
the data should be accounted for. Therefore a multilevel logistic regression
will be used in the empirical part of this paper. The results of various
multilevel logistic regressions clearly indicate differences in transition
probabilities between students graduating from vocational secondary education
versus students graduating from technical secondary education. In addition, a
number of individual characteristics (e.g. grade retention an problematic
non-attendances) also have a significant impact on transition probabilities.
Evidence of the impact of school characteristics and regional characteristics
(e.g. local unemployment rate or an index of urbanization) is mixed. |