The impact of vocational education on productivity in the United States

This paper examines the impact of vocational education on productivity in the United States. By using a cross-correlation test for directional causality, it is shown that vocational education has led to improvements in human capital that in turn increase productivity as measured by real private domestic product per worker hour in nonfarm business. The reverse is not true: that is, changes in productivity do not have a statistically identifiable impact on vocational education. Moreover, the time it takes for significant cross-correlations to appear suggests that the total effect of any vocational educational change takes at least 10 to 20 years to exhaust itself.When the manufacturing sector is studied separately, such positive results are not obtained. Only two out of seven vocational education measures appear to have a significant effect on productivity. For these two measures, the time for an identifiable impact to occur is also fairly long.