Vocational education is a large part of the high school curriculum, yet we have little understanding of what drives vocational enrollment or whether these courses help or harm early careers. To address this deficiency, we develop a framework for curriculum choice, taking into account ability and preferences for academic and vocational work. We test model predictions using detailed transcript and earnings information from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997). Our results are twofold. First, students positively sort into vocational courses, suggesting that the belief that low-ability students are funneled into vocational coursework is unlikely true. Second, we find higher earnings among students taking more upper-level vocational courses—a nearly 2 percent wage premium for each additional year, yet we find no gain from introductory vocational courses. These results suggest: (1) policies limiting students' ability to take vocational courses may not be welfare-enhancing, and (2) the benefits of vocational coursework accrue to those who focus on depth over breadth.

Students starting at a two-year college are much less likely to graduate than similar students who start at a four-year college, but the sources of this attainment gap are largely unexplained. This paper investigates the attainment consequences of sector choice and peer quality among recent high school graduates. Using data on all Preliminary SAT (PSAT) test-takers between 2004 and 2006, we develop a novel measure of peer ability for most two-year and four-year colleges in the United States—the average PSAT of enrolled students. We document substantial variation in this measure of peer quality across two-year colleges and nontrivial overlap between the two-year and four-year sectors. We find that half the gap in bachelor's degree attainment rates across sectors is explained by differences in peers, leaving room for structural barriers to transferring between institutions to also play an important role.

This article examines the effect of institutional quality on the educational attainment of community college students, a large group that has been mostly overlooked in previous work. The effect of institutional quality is generally difficult to separate from that of student ability because more capable students usually sort into better colleges. A detailed analysis of student sorting reveals this not to be the case among community college students, for whom college quality is effectively determined by factors other than their aptitude. This facilitates identification of school quality effects. I find that community college quality (as measured by instructional expenditure per student and several other measures) has no impact on community college students' educational attainment. States and colleges should seek to identify other factors that may be more influential.