Learning the Right Skill: Vocational Curricula and Returns to Skills

Using text data from curricula of the entire Dutch vocational education system, we extract verbs and nouns to measure basic cognitive and cross-functional skills, such as social, technical and resource management skills. This method allows us to uncover, at a fine-grained level, the skills middle-educated students learn at school. We then estimate the returns to these skills. Results show that resource management and social skills have the highest return. Importantly, the returns to skills are strongly conditional on sorting mechanisms. Our results fit in the literature that highlights the demand for complex interactive skills in environments that require more coordination.