What happens with your skills when you leave school?
by Dirk Van Damme
Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education and Skills
Moving from the world of school to the world of work is one
of the most dramatic changes in the lives of young people. And for many
youngsters this transition does not go smoothly. Spells of frictional or
longer-term unemployment, job insecurity because of low-paid or temporary
contracts, and the uncertainties associated with starting to live autonomously
produce a challenging phase in young people’s lives. The most vulnerable people
are those who fall between the two systems: the so-called NEETs (not in employment,
education or training), who are no longer in school and are either unemployed
or inactive. Some 6% of 15-19 year-olds in OECD countries – in other words, half
of those of that age who have left school, or around 5 million young people –
are NEET.
Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education and Skills
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Mean literacy and numeracy score, by age and education enrolment status
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A new Education Indicators in Focus brief looks at the transition from school to work
across different age groups. It reconfirms that leaving school is much less difficult
if one has acquired an upper secondary qualification, which functions as a kind
of security mechanism against most of the hardships associated with the
transition. The share of 20-24 year-old NEETs who do not have an upper
secondary qualification (36%) is double the share of employed 20-24 year-olds
who have not attained that level of education (18%).
But an educational qualification is one thing; the actual
skills that people have are another. The brief publishes some new and interesting
findings about the skills disparities among young people in different age
groups in and out of school. The chart above shows the difference in mean
literacy and numeracy skills between people in and out of education in three
different age groups. The differences are remarkable. Among 16-19 year-olds,
the difference in skills amounts to the equivalent of around 2.5 years of
schooling. But the differences among older age groups are also considerable –
and they remain significant even after controlling for educational attainment.
The finding lends itself to various possible explanations
and observations. The most obvious one is that the results reflect a selection
effect: more-skilled young people tend to stay in school while the less-skilled
leave. A skills-selection effect does not seem to be problematic among 20-24
and 25-29 year-olds, when continuing one’s education is based on educational
merit. For the younger age group, however, the difference in skills signals an
efficiency problem in our education systems. Less-skilled young people should
leave school only after they have acquired a foundation level of skills. When
dropping out of school at an early age is the result of a skills-selection
mechanism, than we are not serving our most vulnerable youngsters well.
Another possible explanation looks at the skills difference
from the other side of the transition: the labour market and the world of work.
This hypothesis suggests that leaving school and entering the labour market is
accompanied by a process of de-skilling. When skills are not used in
employment, they erode. A difficult school-to-work transition can have a scarring
effect that can last throughout an entire career. De-skilling can happen
through unemployment, but also through employment in precarious jobs, where
workers do not fully use their skills, or through employment in an ill-matched
job. This hypothesis suggests that a difficult transition process can undermine
what should be a social benefit: essentially, the investment in skills
acquisition is wasted.
The policy consequences are clear: there are many reasons
for governments to be concerned about the school-to-work transition. Dropping
out of school at an early age without a proper qualification has a huge social
cost. Policies to provide guidance and support to young people during that
transition pay off: there is less risk that people become unemployed or fall
between the cracks and become dependent on welfare systems. And such policies
should encourage people to maintain their skills and give them the opportunity
to improve their skills through quality work and training. The political
responsibility to ensure a smooth transition is enormous, but it is also shared
between the work of education and the world of work.
Links
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Chart source: OECD (2017), in Education Indicators in Focus No. 54, Figure 3.
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