Abstract

This chapter aims to do two things. First, it discusses the literature on the different types of upper secondary education and training systems across OECD countries and reviews some historical evidence on the differential effects of these systems on youth transitions. A typology of upper secondary systems is developed, drawing on the traditional classifications by educational characteristics within comparative education and taking into account the contextual influences of different labor market regimes and welfare systems elaborated in the comparative political economy literature. The effects of the different types of system on skills outcomes are analyzed in terms of their impacts on levels and distributions of young people's literacy and numeracy skills, using the recent data from the OECD Survey of Adult Skills. The implications of these different skills outcomes for youth transitions are considered. Second, the chapter reviews the evidence on changes across countries in youth transitions since the beginning of the 2007/2008 financial crisis – in terms of education participation rates, youth and graduate unemployment and employment rates, graduate wage premia, and rates of return to degrees – and considers how upper secondary education and training systems may have mediated these. It concludes that the upper secondary education training systems continue to exercise differential influences on youth transitions as before the crisis and that varying effects of the crisis on youth transitions across countries are most likely mainly due to different labor market conditions.

Introduction

We may expect that the changes that have occurred since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2007/2008 will have major and lasting effects on young people's lives and future opportunities. Young people have been disproportionately affected by declining real incomes (Atkinson 2014), precarious employment (Standing 2011), and rising unemployment – although in some countries, of course, much more than others. Some of these changes may be largely due to the recession and affect only this generation of youth, although the repercussions for them will be long lasting (see Ashton, this volume). Other changes, however, are more structural and long term.