A Network Approach to High School Career and Technical Education in Chile

Pablo Geraldo Bastias , University of California, Los Angeles

I propose a network representation of the career tracks offered in high schools in Chile, to understand the relationship between tracks, study some structural properties of the network, and explore the careers’ distribution in different regions. Using administrative data from the Chilean Ministry of Education, I constructed a bipartite directed network in which schools point to the careers they offer, and the edges are weighted by enrollment in such careers. Then, I projected the groups, i.e., onto the careers, producing a cocitation network of careers connected if there is a school offering both careers. Using this network, I run a community detection algorithm to identify clusters of careers being co-offered more frequently. I use those results to make some conjectures on the distance of career tracks from the academic track and to provide some hypothesis about the consequences of different tracks for future academic attainment.

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 Presented in Session 8. Economy, Labor Force, Education, & Inequality