The variable "differential missing rate in problem solving" is obtained as the difference between the proportion of individuals with vocational education who failed to be tested for PSTRE and the corresponding proportion among individuals with academic education, by level of education, country and gender.
Low educational level implied elementary school education only; intermediate educational level implied secondary, nonacademic education; and high educational level implied academic education.
We compare four treatments, vocational and academic education at ISCED level 3 4 (upper secondary or post-secondary education), and vocational and academic education at ISCED 5 (tertiary education).
Indeed, the relative effect of vocational education at the tertiary level (compared to academic education at the same level) is that of reducing proficiency in problem solving by 4.4% among males and 4.7% among females.
When we consider the proficiency in foundation skills we find that those with a vocational education tend to be less effective than those with an academic education, for any ISCED level.
When we consider vocational and academic education at the tertiary level (ISCED 5), we find evidence that individuals with the former type of education have significantly lower hourly earnings and a slightly lower probability of being current employed than those with a more academic education.
We find that vocational education at ISCED 3 4 level increases employment probability compared to academic education at the same ISCED level.
We present our estimates of the ATEs involving vocational and academic education at different ISCED levels in Table 3 for numeracy and in Table 4 for problem solving.
As in the case of earnings, we estimate average treatment effects for each of the four available treatments and compute average differences in employment probabilities between vocational and academic education at both ISCED levels.
School level was the variable accounting for more differences, underlining a tendency in people with lower level of academic education to value less the benefits provided by street trees in Porto and attribute more importance to losses and damages, compared to people who attended university or had higher academic degree.
It did not involve taking an examination that would qualify the student for academic studies at the further education level.
