Long-Term Educational Consequences of Vocational Training in Colombia: Impacts on Young Trainees and their Relatives

Abstract

Vocational training evaluations focus on trainees’ earnings. This focus may understate these programs’ benefits if training improves participants’ and relatives’ educational attainment. We use Colombian administrative data and a randomization design to examine the long-term employment and education impacts on trainees and their relatives. Eleven years after randomization, trainees increased higher education enrollments, and their relatives increased secondary school attainment. Training helped relax credit constraints for women, while improving field-specific knowledge for men. Including improved education impacts from training increases the program’s estimated internal rate of return from 22.2% to 24.1% for females and from 10.2% to 25.5% for males.