June 15,2015

(Educators)Some one-year certificates lead to double-digit wage gains.

There's very little scholarly research in the area of vocational training. Hundreds of researchers have looked at whether the cost of a four-year degree is worth it and at how having one will boost lifetime earnings. And many researchers have looked at the value of a two-year associate degree. But vocational training is a notoriously difficult area to study. Some of it takes place at high schools. Some of it takes place at community colleges. For-profit schools and industry trade associations offer programs, too.

Finally, scholars are starting to tackle this often-ignored area of higher education. In 2014, different groups of researchers looked at outcomes for vocational training in Kentucky, California, North Carolina and Virginia. In some cases, they found positive returns, but not all. For example, the Kentucky study found much better returns for men who get vocational training than women.

The researchers tracked the wages of students before and after they received their vocational training, to see what kind of difference it made. And they compared salary increases against those of similar students who started the vocational training but didn't complete it. They found that not all vocational degrees lead to higher income. In some fields, especially health care, vocational degrees pay off enormously – as much as 65 percent more income per year, compared to a similar student who had a similar wage history prior to starting a health care degree, but didn't complete it.

For others fields, such as in informational technology (IT), they don't. Indeed, when you remove all health care-related fields from the analysis, the average salary increase attributable to vocational training was only 5 percent to 10 percent.

"Short-term certificates, in some cases, can have high returns," said Michal Kurlaender, one of the authors. "But there's a huge range."

A health care certificate program that you can complete in less than a year showed an 11 percent return. But a two-year business or IT degree showed returns of 1 percent or less.

The study offers some hope for students older than 30, who are either late in establishing a career or are retraining for a new career. The returns to the investment in a vocational degree were as strong for them as for younger students.