Volume 3, (Supplement) 1968
Corazzini, Arthur J. 1968. "The Decision to Invest in Vocational Education: An Analysis of Costs and Benefits." Journal of Human Resources 3(Supplement):88-120.
The purpose of this study is to measure the economic benefits of the vocational-technical school to the individual graduate and to the local community and to compare these benefits with the economic costs of maintaining the school. To this end, the current and capital direct and implicit costs of the community high school system in Worcester, Massachusetts, are calculated. These cost calculations, along with estimates of private direct and opportunity costs, are then used in the overall evaluation of the investment in vocational education.
The benefit-cost evaluation makes use of wage data taken from a sample of firms in the Worcester area which hired male graduates of both the vocational and the regular high school, as well as the starting wages of all graduates of the vocational high school for boys. In addition to this direct evaluation, the benefits and costs of the vocational program as an investment in dropout prevention are considered, as are the effects of vocational education on geographic mobility.
The author is Assistant Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. This research was supported by funds provided under Title 4(c) of the Vocational Education Act of 1963. It was carried out while the author was a member of the research staff of the Industrial Relation Section, Princeton University. The author wishes to thank the U.S. Office of Education and the Director of the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton, Frederick Harbison, for making this work possible. He also wishes to thank Mary Jean Bowman for several helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper. In particular, the section on joint returns relies on detailed comments made by Miss Bowman.
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