Vocational Education and Active Citizenship Behavior in Cross-National Perspective

Educational systems should provide students with job-relevant skills as well as prepare students for active citizenship. These two core functions of schools may be in conflict with each other, as diversified and vocationally specific educational systems usually do well in terms of labor market preparation (e.g. reduce youth unemployment) but may be detrimental to (commonality in) citizenship education. Yet, there has been no cross-national research that examines the relationship between educational track (vocational or general) and citizenship behavior. This paper investigates whether track placement affects political interest and participation in voluntary organizations for 17 countries, using IALS data and employing multilevel models. It was shown that people educated in vocational programmes were less active citizens than people educated in general education. Moreover, these differences were stronger in strongly stratified educational systems relative to comprehensive systems, indicating that vocationally oriented schooling systems prepare less well for active citizenship than for the labor market.