Does Vocational Training Help Transition to Work? The 'New French Vocational Bachelor Degree'

This article analyses whether graduates in university vocational courses benefited from better labour market outcomes in France than those in academic courses. We focus on bachelor degrees in France, comparing 'general' or 'academic' degrees with 'vocational' degrees. The vocational bachelor degree was created in 1999 in the continuity of the education policy of expanding the number of vocational courses in French universities and in the framework of the Bologna Process. It aimed to lead to a new qualification at the intermediate level between the qualified technicians' diplomas and the engineering or senior management diplomas. We use a French survey on higher education leavers in 2001 who were interviewed in 2004. In order to take into account the selection in the vocational track, we applied statistical methods which allow us to compare graduates with similar characteristics. Our results show that education mismatch is less great for vocational bachelor graduates, which is coherent with the idea that the vocational track better responds to employers' needs. In addition, we find empirical evidence that vocational bachelors tend to be associated with higher pay even after accounting for the heterogeneity of students. Our last findings suggest that the university-employer link specifically developed for the vocational bachelor course influences the way vocational graduates find their job: they are significantly more likely to use university-based contacts to obtain their first jobs.