MACROECONOMIC CONDITIONS AND EDUCATIONAL POLICY PREFERENCES The case of youth unemployment and VET

Abstract: On the subject of educational policy preferences, much are left to be said. Although the bulk of work on determinants has focused on welfare policies at large, a new strand of literature are making the case that education can be fruitfully integrated into comparative welfare studies. However, earlier models that tried to predict what kind of welfare policies an individual want depending on their exposure to risks are not as useful when it comes to education, and therefore new theories needs to be advanced. By focusing on the case of youth unemployment and prefering VET over general education, this thesis advances the discussion of educational policy determinants. By utilizing two separate datasets with their own set of strengths, this thesis first builds a multilevel logistic model to determine how youth unemployment affect the attractiveness of VET compared to general education with the Eurobarometer dataset. Secondly, the newly gathered INVEDUC dataset is used to gauge the effects of living in a country with high or low youth unemployment on prefering more VET. In conclusion, although this thesis fails to find a direct effect of youth unemployment on educational policy prefrences, it does find evidence for how micro-level determinants are shaped by youth unemployment and how their effect of educational policy preferences depend on the level of youth unemployment. For future research, it is crucial to consider causal heterogeneity based on macroeconomic and social conditions when conducting cross-national analysis.