General or vocational? The tough choice in the Chinese education policy

China has made great efforts to vocationalise its senior secondary education in the belief that vocational education better than general education can prepare young people with the skills needed for employment in industry. This runs against a large empirical literature from the last few decades arguing strongly against vocational education on employment opportunity and cost-effectiveness grounds. This paper examines the relationship between employees' educational (and other) backgrounds and their performance in the workplace, as well as their income, based on a survey of 1433 employees in two cities in China. It concludes that pre-employment education gives better work performance, but that vocational education does not lead to better performance than general education. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.