Does it pay off to specialize? The interplay between educational specificity, level and cyclical sensitivity

This paper investigates how the specificity of the field of study is related to the quality of school-to-work transitions, and whether this relation is moderated by the level of education and the cyclical sensitivity of the field of study. We apply a processual approach and produce a typology of school-to-work transitions based on labor market position and income. This is done with multichannel sequence analysis on register data on school-leavers in the Netherland for the 2009–2010 cohort (N = 182,057). The results confirm that specificity is positively related to the quality of school-to-work transitions in terms of employment and income security. This however mostly holds for the highest levels of upper-secondary vocational education (ISCED 354), and much less for the lower levels of upper-secondary vocational education and tertiary education. In contrast to our expectations, specificity was more often related to positive career outcomes for cyclically sensitive fields of study.