Rethinking the Relationship between the Growth of the Secondary Education System and Employment: Evidence from Turkey

The contribution of the secondary education system to employment is among the priority areas of educational policy since it has employment-related aims for students who do not/cannot continue on to higher education. In Turkey, the secondary education system has increasingly grown with students and schools included in the system. Consequently, secondary school graduates have increasingly demanded access to employment opportunities. Therefore, this paper investigates the relations between the growth based on the number of students and schools in the secondary education system and the employment of secondary school graduates in Turkey. Long- and short-run relationships between the growth in the secondary education system and employed secondary school graduates were investigated by employing Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Bounds Testing approach. Although analysis pointed out a cointegration between the growth in the secondary education and employment, long-run coefficients of variables were found to be insignificant.