High school vocational education has a controversial history in the United States, largely due to a perceived tradeoff between teaching readily deployable occupational skills versus shunting mostly disadvantaged students away from the educational and career flexibility afforded by general academic courses. We study the effects of a nationwide high…

Most upper-secondary schools in Norway are so-called combined schools, where vocational and general departments exist side by side. This paper investigates whether school characteristics affect academic students' performance. Academic performance is shown to deteriorate when the number of departments increases. There is an optimal department size,…