In fact, adding two very broad indicator variables representing vocational and
general education, with roughly 30 per cent untagged as a reference group,
makes the coefficient of females with three years imply a return of 15 per cent.
One could perhaps also think that women’s traditionally larger responsibility
for household work may influence these results. However, excluding females
with children does not alter the implications of Table 11.
Finally, additional regressions were run concerning individuals with a two-
year upper secondary education and more than 500 credits from komvux. The
coefficients of the interaction variables are then insignificantly different from
zero when the continuous variable from Table 10 is used. When the binary
variables are used instead, as in Table 11, parameters for males with less than
two years in higher studies are again significantly negative, with coefficient
values higher in absolute numbers, -.211 and -.213. For females with one year
the coefficient value is also blown up to -.199 and females with three years are
indicated to have a lower payoff, by 13.3 per cent, than individuals with no
prior AE.
5.3 Summary of the results
The evaluation of AE in this paper is made in partial analyses and does not
provide a unique treatment effect of AE. A way of getting closer to some ‘full
assessment‘ of AE is to relate the different results to the fractions of AE par-
ticipants belonging to the subgroups analyzed. To keep it as simple as possible,
one could abstain from quantifying the point estimates above and instead view
the groups as having either positive or negative (or zero) effects of AE. Among
individuals never registered in higher education, Table 6 displayed that those
with compulsory school prior to enrolment experienced positive effects, as did
the group with a two-year upper secondary schooling, while the group with
three-year upper secondary schooling was associated with several negative es-
timates, especially for males. The individuals that continued to university and
pursued less than two years of higher education did not get a significant pay off
to their schooling (Table 11), while those who continued further generally
showed positive returns. However, individuals with a two-year upper secon-
dary education and AE are clearly not transformed from experiencing positive
to negative effects just because they register in higher education. Of the indi-
viduals with less than two years at university, 57 per cent had in 1990 only
IFAU - Does adult education at upper secondary level influence annual wage earnings?
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