Article Green Open Access 2023

Does it pay off to specialize? The interplay between educational specificity, level and cyclical sensitivity

ML
Mattijssen, Lucille M.S.
 PD
Pavlopoulos, Dimitris
 SW
Smits, Wendy
Social Science Research
Journal · Vol. 109 · Art. 102782
Abstract

This paper investigates how the specificity of the field of study is related to the quality of school-to-work transitions, and whether this relation is moderated by the level of education and the cyclical sensitivity of the field of study. We apply a processual approach and produce a typology of school-to-work transitions based on labor market position and income. This is done with multichannel sequence analysis on register data on school-leavers in the Netherland for the 2009–2010 cohort (N = 182,057). The results confirm that specificity is positively related to the quality of school-to-work transitions in terms of employment and income security. This however mostly holds for the highest levels of upper-secondary vocational education (ISCED 354), and much less for the lower levels of upper-secondary vocational education and tertiary education. In contrast to our expectations, specificity was more often related to positive career outcomes for cyclically sensitive fields of study. © 2022

Keywords

Author Keywords

School-to-work transition Educational specificity Multichannel sequence analysis Non-standard employment

Index Keywords

Employment human Humans educational status Vocational education school Schools income
Author Affiliations
Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, The Hague, Netherlands
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands
Funding & Acknowledgements
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, NWO
This research is part of the research programme ‘Non-standard employment: Prospect or precarity?’ (project number 406.16.541 ), which is financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
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