Does adult education at upper secondary level influence annual wage earnings?

sector has a compressed wage structure and offers safe employment conditions,
possibly also with an over-representation of part-time employees. Male choices
are far more dispersed across educations. Around 20 per cent are in engineering
mechanics, electronics and information technology, and there are 27 different
study directions with more than one per cent of the sample. For females, there
are only twelve. There is also a gender difference among those with three years
of higher education. Males are again relatively dispersed across different study
directions. Twenty two per cent chose business administration but otherwise
there is no category to exceed 5 per cent. Females are again more concentrated
to a few academic careers that are typical for the public sector; 19 per cent in
teaching at lower level compulsory school (children aged 7-12 years old), 14
per cent in business administration, 10 per cent trained nurses and 10 per cent
trained social workers.

5 Estimations and results

This section presents estimation methods and results of evaluating the effects
of upper secondary AE on annual wage earnings. It essentially consists of two
separate parts, which correspond to the structure in section 4. Section 5.1 is de-
voted to a sample conditioned never to have been registered in higher educa-
tion. Conversely, section 5.2 deals with individuals who at some point have had
such a registration. Estimates then also consider whether prior enrolment in AE
has any bearing on the probability of completing four years of higher studies,
i.e. the equivalent of a Master’s degree. Section 5.3 contains a summary of the
results.

When evaluating effects of education with non-experimental data, the big-
gest challenge constitutes sources of selection bias that may exaggerate or un-
derestimate a true underlying effect. Productive individuals who possess some
form of ability may on average get a higher payoff to AE or higher education.
If they are aware of this, they should be overrepresented among the participants
and create an upward bias in estimations of the returns. On the other hand,
more able individuals could also be deterred from enrolment as they face
higher opportunity costs in terms of forgone earnings. An additional source of
heterogeneous effects may arise from the timing of enrolment. Two identical
individuals who enrol in AE in different years may experience diverse payoffs

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