Post-18 education: who is taking different routes and how much do they earn?

After finishing compulsory education, young people in England have a range of higher education (HE) and further education (FE) options available to them. While people are familiar with the route taken by most HE learners - completing A Levels and then a degree at university - less is commonly understood about FE at tertiary level. In this note, we address this by describing the educational routes taken by individuals who choose to pursue tertiary-level FE courses. Additionally, we show how learners in different post-18 education routes differ by prior attainment, age and gender. As well as presenting descriptive evidence, we examine the association between different educational pathways and future earnings. Specifically, we present estimates of the early-labour-market returns (at age 26 and age 30) associated with different levels of post-18 qualifications.

We find that, on average, certain FE qualifications, such as Level 4 qualifications for men and Level 5 qualifications for women, are associated with higher average early-labour-market earnings than completing a degree. We find that these patterns hold even once we condition on observable characteristics. Whilst we use the term 'returns', we are careful not to claim that these estimates capture the causal impact of taking these qualifications, as there may be other factors that we do not observe that may potentially account for selection of different individuals into the different routes. This note is structured as follows. We begin by introducing the data and sample used in our study. Next, we present our emerging findings on the different routes taken through post-18 education, as well as the characteristics of learners in different routes. Finally, we investigate earnings outcomes for the different post-18 routes and what happens to those earnings outcomes once we condition on observable characteristics of the people taking them.

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