The Rise and Decline of Vocational Education

In this paper, the expansion of and the relative emphasis on secondary vocational education is placed in a broad historical and cross-national perspective. First, the origins of technical-vocational education in both European and non-European systems are briefly outlined. Second, contemporary enrollment patterns in vocational education (1950-1975) are analyzed in light of the paper's main empirical finding: the relative share of secondary vocational education has declined in almost every national educational system. Third, a number of causal factors are introduced to account for cross-national and temporal variation in the proportion of secondary vocational enrollments. Finally, the paper discusses why the structural shift away from vocational education is best understood in the framework of recent world-system theories of educational expansion.