Increasing the share of vocational secondary schooling has been a mainstay of development policy for
decades, especially in formerly socialist countries. However, the transition to market economies led to
significant restructuring of school systems and a decline in the number of vocational students. Exposing
more students to a general curriculum could improve academic abilities. To test the hypothesis that delayed
vocational streaming improves academic outcomes, this paper analyses Poland’s significant improvement
in international achievement tests and the restructuring of the education system, which expanded general
schooling. Using propensity-score matching and difference-in-differences estimates, the authors show that
delaying vocational education had a positive and significant impact on student performance on the order of
one standard deviation.
