General or Vocational? Evidence on School Choice, Returns, and “Sheep Skin” Effects from Egypt 1998

Fatma El-Hamidi

No 406, Working Papers from Economic Research Forum

Abstract: The debate on the relative benefits of upper secondary vocational education and of general education is still going. While this area of research has been very active in the United States and industrialized countries in recent years, empirical work in the Middle East countries still lacking. This study adds new evidence to that debate. The paper identifies factors that influence an individual’s choice between vocational and general education in Egypt as well as the relative returns between them and beyond secondary levels. Using an ordered logit model, the study finds that an individual from a well educated family is more likely to undertake general education. The presence of young siblings in the household motivates the parents to send their daughters to vocational schooling, but not their sons. After correcting for self-selection, the study also finds vocational education to offer higher returns (earnings) than general secondary education does for men, but not for women. Sheepskin effect was also evident for men but not for women.

Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2004-08-01, Revised 2004-08-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published by The Economic Research Forum (ERF)

Downloads: (external link)
http://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/0406_final.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/0406_final.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/0406_final.pdf)
http://bit.ly/2p5jK66 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:erg:wpaper:0406

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Economic Research Forum Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Namees Nabeel ().