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

Unlike earlier studies of komvux, information from the register data on the
number of credits actually attained is used. This makes it possible to generate
estimates of the returns on annual wage earnings of a year of upper secondary
AE, a measure comparable to estimates in the economics literature on returns
to schooling. The second contribution concerns the large fraction of AE partici-
pants, 44 per cent, that continued to higher education. Questions addressed
include whether individuals with or without a prior AE differ in their university
achievements and/or in their returns to higher education. To my knowledge,
none of these issues have been subject to a systematic analysis before.

The report unfolds as follows. The Swedish educational system is described
in section 2. Section 3 presents the theoretically and empirically related litera-
ture. Descriptive data is found in section 4 and empirical estimation methods
and results in section 5. Section 6 concludes.

2 The Swedish educational system

Compulsory school in Sweden is nine years and usually takes place from age
seven to fifteen. It is followed by upper secondary school, which until 1996
was either for two or three years depending on program choice. Two-year up-
per secondary school programs consisted of some 15 relatively heterogeneous
educations, mainly vocational and with strong gender patterns, e.g. construc-
tion, house-painting and electronics attracted males while nursing attracted fe-
males. Three-year upper secondary school, on the other hand, mostly involved
theoretical studies in human science, social science, business administration,
natural science or technical studies, this last also with an optional fourth year.

Eligibility to higher education is obtained by fulfilling a general admission
requirement, normally a three-year upper secondary diploma. Specific require-
ments apply in some cases, depending on the type of education. Individuals at
least 25 years old may also be admitted to higher studies if four years of work
experience and passing grades in Swedish and English at upper secondary
level. At the universities, many undergraduate programs and specific courses
have more applicants than there are seats. At least one third of the seats must be
offered based on the grade point averages (GPA) attained at upper secondary
level. Those who feel unsure whether their GPA from upper secondary school
is sufficiently high to gain admission can also write the Swedish Scholastic

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

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