Why Vocational Education Rules

Fans of college love to contrast the average college graduate to the average high school graduate. Fans of vocational education love to contrast successful plumbers, electricians, and mechanics to debt-ridden baristas with English degrees. Such comparisons don’t just stack the deck. Worse, they lose sight of social returns. The search for desirable education policies should start by measuring effects on students’ careers. Yet no search is complete without a guesstimate of signaling’s share.

The selfish return to vocational education. In proponents’ eyes, vocational education raises pay, reduces unemployment, and increases high school completion. Research, though a bit sparse, supports proponents on all counts. Core insight: vocational students are typically “academic underachievers” before entering the vocational track. The right metric isn’t, “How do vocational students compare to average students?” but rather, “How do vocational students compare to comparable students who didn’t study a trade?” Vocational ed fares well by this metric. It raises pay more than academic coursework.9 It reduces unemployment more than academic coursework.10 It even boosts high school graduation: the academically uninclined are less prone to quit school when they don’t detest all their classes.11 Vocational education even seems to deter crime.12 Those who search for the most lucrative mix of academic and vocational education normally discover students are too academic for their own good. Most will earn more if they replace some—but not all—of their standard courses with vocational alternatives.13

Researchers do sporadically detect long-run drawbacks of vocational education. A notable paper finds that once workers reach their fifties, vocational backgrounds mildly retard employment rates.14 Given all the advantages of vocational ed for workers under fifty, though, this is praising with faint damnation. Higher wages, higher employment, higher completion rates: snap all three pieces together, and the selfish return to vocational education in high school is at least a percentage point higher than normal. Weak and disgruntled students enjoy especially rich rewards.

The social returns to vocational education. Signaling isn’t the only reason selfish and social returns diverge. Public funding, taxation, redistribution, crime, and more play a role. Yet signaling’s share is the axis around which all else revolves. What fraction of vocational ed’s selfish benefits stem from signaling?

The lowest estimates, strangely, come from vocational education’s critics. Many inadvertently set its signaling share below zero. How so? Critics fear that vocational education bears a stigma.15 Specializing in auto shop tarnishes your image because society infers you “lack the talent for anything better.” Restated in the language of signaling: the vocational path sends bad signals about raw ability.

In this scenario, vocational education enriches society more than it enriches vocational students. Society gains the extra productivity, but students capture the extra productivity less the stigma. Imagine you’re an average student contemplating the vocational track. With academic training, you produce $100 a day; vocational training boosts your productivity to $120 a day. Unfortunately, the average vocational student’s raw ability is $10 below average. If you go vocational, employers assume you fit this profile. Skills and stigma are a package deal, so you earn $110 a day—the productivity of the average vocational student—even though you personally produce $120 a day (see Table 8.1).

Does vocational study really so tarnish your image? While it’s tempting to declare, “The jury is still out,” the truth is more like, “The jury has yet to be convened.” To my knowledge, this lamented stigma remains unmeasured. Still, the critics probably go too far. In our society, even incurable snobs rank vocational students above high school dropouts. The signal vocational ed sends is weak, not bad.

In any case, matching course content to job openings remains the most direct way to ballpark vocational ed’s signaling share. All classes prepare students for some job. Auto shop teaches students how to repair cars; history teaches students how to do history. From a signaling standpoint, the issue is always, “How often do students use the skills they learn?” Vocational ed stands out because it prepares students for common jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States has roughly 900,000 carpenters, 700,000 auto mechanics, and 400,000 plumbers. Classic college-prep classes like literature, foreign language, and history fall short because they prepare students for rare jobs. The whole U.S. employs only 129,000 writers, 64,000 translators, and 3,800 historians.16

What then is vocational education’s signaling share? Bearing both stigma and job relevance in mind, half of normal is a reasonable guess. Suppose my earlier 80% signaling figure is correct, so 40% of vocational education’s payoff stems from signaling. Then ignoring the selfish advantages of learning a trade—extra income, higher employment, better high school completion rates—the social return for vocational ed surpasses regular high school’s by at least four percentage points. The social return for Poor Students—especially male Poor Students—exceeds 7%. Fiddling with the signaling assumption naturally shifts the bottom line, but as long as conventional schooling’s signaling share exceeds 50%, halving it dramatically boosts social returns.

What makes vocational ed’s social return so ample? Status is zero-sum; skill is not. Conventional education mostly helps students by raising their status, but average status cannot rise. Vocational education mostly helps students by building their skills—and average skill can rise. Why are social returns especially ample for Poor Students? Because vocational ed trains these crime-prone students for productive work without igniting severe credential inflation.17

What’s Wrong With Child Labor?

School is not vocational education’s only venue. If learning job skills in the school is good, wouldn’t learning job skills on the job be better? Unfortunately, we have an innocuous yet infamous label for kids learning job skills on the job: “child labor.”

Civilized adults recoil at the name. Children with joy in their hearts don’t belong in gray workshops, toiling all day long, cogs in the machine. They’re kids, not robots! Well, unless the gray workshop is called a “school” and the cogs earn zero wages. No one cares if kids devote every free minute to basketball or violin, but gainful employment is for grown-ups. Hostility to child labor admittedly mellows as “children” approach adulthood, but we’re still supposed to spurn the idea of 16-year-olds quitting school to work full time.

Child labor laws reflect these popular sentiments. Federal regulations do more than exclude minors from dangerous jobs. Outside of family businesses, farming, newspaper delivery, and performing arts, work for kids under 14 is all but prohibited. U.S. federal law caps 14- and 15-year-olds’ work at three hours a day on school days and eighteen hours a week on school weeks.19 Plenty of states have stricter regulations. Under California law, 16- and 17-year-olds may not work without school permission or more than four hours on a school day.20

When children languish in school, adults rush to rationalize. Making kids sit at desks doing boring busywork may seem cruel, but their pain trains them for the future. Why then is child labor so reviled? Toil may not be fun, but it too trains kids for their future.

Child labor has a dark side.21 Then again, so does book learning. When my mom was a schoolgirl, the nuns in charge freely hit kids with sticks. Judging either activity by long-gone creepy abuses is folly. In modern times, is there any decent reason to discourage kids from getting jobs and learning job skills?

The silliest objection is that businesses “exploit” our children, handing them a pittance for their toil. No one expects schools to pay their students; the training kids receive is payment enough. Why hold firms to a higher standard? College students ferociously compete for unpaid internships because training is valuable compensation—and total compensation, not cash alone, is what counts.22 In any case, if the young were really grossly underpaid, employing them would be extraordinarily profitable—and thanks to competition, few business models stay extraordinarily profitable for long.

Another complaint is that children are too immature to know a bad deal when they see it. As a father of four, I don’t demur. But we normally rely on parents to protect kids from their own childishness. Under current U.S. law, moms and dads can already employ their sons and daughters on almost any terms they please.23 The natural rationale is that few want to mistreat their flesh and blood. Exceptions notwithstanding, parents are children’s best guardians. Once we trust them to decide whether they’re fairly compensating their kids, why not trust parents to decide whether someone else is fairly compensating their kids?

A more thoughtful objection is that work is good, but school is better. Child labor distracts youths from their primary mission: academic success. The critical premise is that the academic path is so reliably superior that leaving students the option to prioritize work over school is dangerous. On cursory look, the facts fit: working students average lower grades, worse behavior, and more trouble with the law.

But a closer look tells another tale altogether. Working students’ visible shortcomings predate their employment. When researchers compare working students to comparable nonworking students, work has a clear upside and no clear downside. Early job experience has durable dividends, boosting postgraduation earnings by 5, 10, or even 20% for at least a decade.24 The link between work and academic success, in contrast, is weak.25 The same goes for crime and other bad behavior.26 According to one intriguing study, looser child labor laws cut education and crime; locking work-oriented students in school makes them “act out.”27 The two-thirds of 16-to-19-year-olds who don’t even try to work during the school year are missing a major opportunity.28

To be clear, none of this research urges teens to quit high school to get full-time jobs. Researchers who hail the long-run career benefits of youthful employment remain skeptical of “intense” work—30 or 40 hours a week. For selfish returns, they’re probably right. In our society, high school dropouts bear a savage stigma.

For public policy, however, selfish returns are a distraction; social returns alone matter. Since stigma hurts only selfish returns, wise policy analysts ignore it. Instead, they compare skills students learn in class to skills students learn on the job. Frankly, there’s no comparison. Doing any job teaches you how to do a job.29 If this seems a low bar, recall that almost half of dropouts and a third of high school graduates these days aren’t even looking for work. Acclimating them to any form of employment would be a step up.

Since the minimum wage doesn’t vary by age or experience, we shouldn’t worry that youths will be “exploited.” We should worry that youths—especially Poor Students—won’t be hired at all.30 Under current law, untrained workers must produce the cost of their training plus $7.25 an hour to be profitably employed.31 Quite a catch-22, especially for slow learners: you need training to become a productive worker, but firms won’t train you unless you already are a productive worker.

Aren’t unpaid internships a massive loophole? Not taking the law literally. In the for-profit sector, the U.S. Department of Labor allows unpaid internships only if “the employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern.”32 A bizarre rule. Why would a for-profit firm bother hiring workers from whom it derives zero immediate advantage? If you sought to convince a CEO to start an internship program, your pitch wouldn’t be, “Let’s hire a bunch of inexperienced workers to provide our firm with no immediate benefits whatsoever.”

Unpaid internships survive because authorities hypocritically fail to enforce the letter of the law. As long as interns are college students or recent college grads learning a college-like job, government turns a blind eye. If McDonald’s hired unpaid trainees, prosecution would be swift. Unlike orthodox observers, I hasten to add, I say we need more hypocrisy. Instead of ending the unofficial exemption for college interns, we should grant it to everyone.

What else should policy makers do? Deregulate and destigmatize child labor. Early jobs are good for kids and good for society. Parental oversight isn’t a perfect way to root out abuses, but we rely on it in virtually every other sphere of life. Parents can make their kids devote their childhoods to sports and music—no matter how much they hate playing. Parents can sign their kids up for mountain climbing. Parents can take their kids to dangerous countries. Holding nonfamilial employment to stricter standards than mountain climbing is senseless.

Once child labor is legal, some teens will take full-time jobs. As long as they have their parents’ permission, let them. If this means dropping out of high school, we should set our phobias aside and allow that too. Selfishly speaking, the average dropout is making a mistake. Plenty of students, though, are not average, starting with the silent minority who like work and loathe school. Working enthusiastically probably has a higher selfish return than studying apathetically, because the labor market rewards graduation, not attendance. In any case, education policy should never lose sight of signaling. Students who quit school to work curb credential inflation, opening doors for peers who stay in school because, “You can’t get a good job without a diploma.” When Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, he didn’t just strike it rich; he struck a blow against credential inflation.

What about setting up a formal apprenticeship system? The best regimes are jewels, but they’re notoriously difficult to emulate. Most countries can’t be Germany. Internationally, apprenticeship programs consistently outshine adult job training programs, but that’s faint praise indeed.33 Before using taxpayer dollars to jumpstart apprenticeships, government should get out of the way and take stock of all the opportunities the labor market provides.

Misvocational Education, or 1 > 0

Most education experts remain leery of vocational ed. Chief objection: it’s shortsighted. The vocational track teaches students specific skills they need for their first job. The academic track teaches students general skills they need for every job. The wise approach is to set everyone on the academic track. Let kids max out their general skills before targeting any particular vocation.

This objection is confused. While literacy and numeracy are genuinely general skills, most academic classes amount to vocational training for ultrarare vocations. Think about classic college prep in literature, history, social science, and foreign language. Only a handful of occupations use the skills these classes teach. Science and higher mathematics are more relevant, but even college grads rarely apply them on the job.35 STEM is vocational training for quants and scientists, not general training for workers.

Ultimately, then, the debate is between two kinds of vocational education. “Traditionalists” want to train everyone for long-shot, prestigious careers like author, historian, political scientist, translator, physicist, and mathematician. So-called vocationalists want to train students for careers they’re likely to enter. The traditional route is painless for educators: teach your students whatever your teachers taught you. The vocational route is painful for educators: to follow it, we must keep tabs on student aptitudes and the job market. So be it. To prepare youths for plausible futures, educators must feel the pain.

Defenders of traditional academics often appeal to the obscurity of the future. The labor market is mercurial mutation. What’s the point of prepping students for the economy of 2015, when they’ll be employed in the economy of 2025 or 2050? Fair enough, but this is no argument for old-school academics. Ignorance of the future is no excuse for preparing students for occupations they almost surely won’t have. And if we know anything about the future of work, we know that demand for authors, historians, political scientists, translators, physicists, and mathematicians will stay low.

The crowd-pleasing objection to vocationalism, though, is not epistemic, but egalitarian. Placing everyone on the academic track seems more equal than sorting children by “aptitude” and assigning them to “suitable” training. You could say equality is already an illusion; despite the fiction of college prep for all, colleges count only honors and A.P. as the genuine article. Yet the ambitious egalitarian would retort, “Then let’s have honors and A.P. coursework for all.”

This sounds lovely but works poorly. Egalitarians picture college prep as a free lunch: anyone who fails academically can switch to the vocational track, so everyone might as well start with academics. This ignores the disturbing possibility that after academic students crash, they’ll be too embittered to learn a trade.36 When such students start on the academic route, they learn how to do zero jobs. When they start on the vocational route, in contrast, they probably learn how to do one job.

The vast American underclass shows this disturbing possibility is more than theoretically possible. Keeping bored, resentful kids on the academic track backfires. Instead of “downshifting” to vocational training, they settle for unskilled labor—or worse. Remember: about 20% of Americans never earn a standard high school diploma.37 Training likely dropouts to do a midskill job when they’re 12 or 14 is no panacea, but it’s more realistic than hoping they’re “late-blooming” stars. Does this deprive such students of the chance to rise high up the social ladder? Debatably. Yet it slashes their risk of starting adulthood bereft of marketable skills.38

High school dropouts aren’t the only kids who learn how to do zero jobs. After graduation, plenty of high school and even college students taste how unqualified they are. Think of the timeless question, “What can you do with an English degree?” For many, as we’ve seen, the answer is: be a bartender, cashier, cook, janitor, security guard, or waiter. Literally speaking, of course, no one uses their English degree to guard a warehouse. The real story is their education prepared them for no realistic occupation, so they learned how to guard warehouses on the job.

Historically, teachers trained students for three specific professions: the clergy, law, and medicine. The modern curriculum is more versatile but has changed far less than educators like to think. Today’s schools prepare students for careers as authors, poets, mathematicians, scientists, artists, musicians, historians, translators, and professional athletes. Yet the fraction of students who enter these occupations is trivial. Contrary to popular proeducation rhetoric, schools devote little time to “general skills.” Instead, students spend their days training for jobs few want and even fewer get. As a result, many leave high school, college, and even grad school with zero realistic career options. Thankfully, most recover by absorbing useful skills on the job. Inexcusably, a sizable minority do not. All the years kids sit in school are more than enough to teach everyone how to do at least one job—and knowing one job is vastly better for the individual and mankind than knowing none. 1 > 0.

Youth Reimagined

In backward nations, youths work. In advanced nations, youths study. As civilization advances, the young spend ever more years sequestered from paid employment. The modern fear is that work might interfere with school, never that school might interfere with work. These rules are so ingrained they seem like laws of nature.

The logic is elusive. As society evolves, teaching the young different occupations is common sense. Teaching them no occupations and hoping they adapt to the job market after graduation is not. It doesn’t matter how futuristic our society becomes. Making kids study irrelevant material for a decade-plus is timelessly dysfunctional.

What’s the alternative? Reboot vocational education. Sticking with the classic curriculum instead of trying to forecast the job market is looking for your keys under the streetlight because it’s brighter there. Sure, teach the genuinely general skills: reading, writing, math. But otherwise, schools should make educated guesses about future career opportunities, measure students’ aptitudes, then expose them to plausible occupations. Instead of viewing youth employment as “exploitation” or a risky distraction from school, we should celebrate work as vocational education in its purest form. When the young quit school to work full time, we should not mourn. Such kids will never cure cancer, but at least they’ll be self-supporting members of society.

Isn’t this a grim dystopian vision? Not at all. Visualize a world where 16-year-olds have real job skills and earn enough to provide for themselves. Visualize a world where academically uninclined preteens look up to apprentices instead of delinquents. Visualize a world where students find their lessons either practical or interesting. If we could raise a new productive, independent, engaged generation, wouldn’t that be a great improvement over the bored, infantilized youth of today?

Instead of fearing a dystopian future, we should gawk at our dystopian present. In modern societies, achievement-oriented kids spend almost two decades in school. Most find the curriculum dreadfully dull. During this drawn-out ordeal, students are either poor or financially dependent on their parents. When they finally join the “real world,” graduates apply only a sliver of what they studied. Once they have kids of their own, they reexperience extended immaturity from the parent’s side. Our status quo isn’t 1984 or Brave New World. But if we weren’t used to our education system, who would wish for it?