Rolf van der Velden

Early school-leaving is considered a societal problem, but it is unclear which family factors explain this. In this article, we focus on three family resources that may explain early school-leaving: parent’s cognitive skills at age 12, parent’s educational attainment, and household income. By combining the Intergenerational Transmission of Skills dataset and administrative data from the Netherlands Cohort Study on Education, we follow the educational career of almost 22,000 children. Structural equation models allow us to determine the relative importance of children’s skills and family resources. Focusing on the direct effects, we find that children’s cognitive skills at age 12 and initial track placement in secondary education contribute most to the risk of early school-leaving (66 per cent of the explained variance), followed by parent’s household income (25 per cent) and parent’s educational attainment (9 per cent). However, family resources may also indirectly explain early school-leaving by children’s cognitive skills at age 12 and their initial track placement. Here, parent’s cognitive skills at age 12 play the most important role. If we take that into account, we find that the total effect of parental resources increases, with parents’ cognitive skills at age 12 having the strongest contribution (18 per cent), immediately followed by household income (14 per cent) and parental educational attainment (11 per cent). These results demonstrate how important family resources are for protecting against early school-leaving, both directly and indirectly.

To date, it is unclear in which skills mismatches are most relevant for individuals’ wages, and whether surpluses or deficits in one domain can offset those in another. This study addresses these gaps by examining how mismatches in five key skill domains (ICT, reading, mathematics, science, and reasoning) are linked to individuals’ wages. Utilizing data from the 2016 wave of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) Adult Cohort, our findings reveal that skill deficits consistently result in lower wages, whereas surpluses do not pay off in each domain. Notably, mismatches in ICT skills are most significant for individuals’ wages: ICT deficits not only reduce wages, but can also negate wage benefits from surpluses in other skills. Conversely, ICT surpluses can compensate for wage penalties associated with deficits in other domains. These findings underscore the importance of digital skills for productivity and wage potential in the modern labour market.

This paper compares the employment outcomes of liberal arts graduates from Dutch university colleges with those of their peers who pursued conventional, subject-specific bachelor’s degrees. Using data from the Dutch National Alumni Survey, the analysis includes 14,933 respondents who completed a master’s programme at a research university, with 210 of them holding a university college degree. Logistic, multinomial, and OLS regression analyses were performed on six labour market outcomes: employment status, time to first paid job, vertical match, horizontal match, vertical and horizontal match combination, and hourly wage from regular work. Propensity score matching was used as a robustness check. The results show that holding a university college degree is not associated with any distinct advantages or disadvantages in the job market. While a liberal arts bachelor’s degree has a negative effect on obtaining employment in STEM professions, no statistically significant differences, neither negative nor positive, were found in other outcomes. This suggests that university colleges do not lack the capacity to prepare students for the labour market.