Diferencias en resultados académicos entre educación técnico-profesional y humanista-científica en Chile

Differences in learning outcomes between technical-professionaleducation and scientific-humanistic education in ChileMauricio Farías, Rafael Carrasco1ABSTRACTThis study analyzes differences in academic achievement among students enrolled in vocational education compared to students in academic education at the secondary level in Chile. Using OLS, propensity score matching and sensitivity analysis we examine test score differences between 10th and 12th grades in math and language. The study provides evidence that vocational education students perform, on average, 0.28 standard deviations below similar students in academic education. There is additional evidence of differentiated effects depending on the initial achievement levels. These effects range from 0.08 to 0.49 standard deviations for lower and higher achievers respectively. Finally, the sensitivity analysis suggests that most of these differences are important enough to be significant even in the presence of potentially strong omitted variables.Keywords: vocational education, academic education, achievement, propensity score matching1 Universidad de Stanford, California, EE.UU. Contacto: mauricio_farias@yahoo.com