Labour Outcomes of Graduates and Dropouts of High School and Post-secondary Education: Evidence for Canadian 24- to 26-year-olds in 2005

The purpose of this research is to estimate the impact of education, with a particular focus on education levels lower than a university diploma, on the labour market and social outcomes of the 24- to 26-year-old Canadians found in the fourth wave of the Youth in Transition Survey (YITS), conducted by Statistics Canada in 2006. We focus on differences between individuals who did not pursue college or university level degrees. We find that dropouts perform very poorly for most of the outcomes we analyse. Our most important result is that males who finish their high-school degree very late (after 19 years of age), perform, ceteris paribus, at many levels like dropouts. This suggests that policy makers should be taking a very close look at “second chance” or “adult education” programs across Canada