The pathways to college

We estimate the returns to college by school type using data from the Italian Participation Labor and Unemployment Survey. We find that returns are lower for vocational than for academic high school graduates in terms of employment probability (24%), hourly wages (23.1%), and the probability of finding the first job less than 1 year after graduation (29.2%). The wage penalty associated with high school vocational education is lower when we consider college majors such as engineering and economics and business, for which the complementarity with the vocational skills developed in high school is presumably higher.