The changing structure of school to work transition in Brazil

Mudanças na estrutura da transição escola-trabalho no Brasil

Cambios en la estructura de la transición escuela-trabajo en Brasil

Abstract

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the changing structure and consequences of the links between the educational system and labor markets in Brazil in the past 30 years. Using the linkages methodology proposed by DiPrete et al. (2017) and Elbers (2021), we identify changes in education-occupation linkage that were offset by Brazil’s rapid educational expansion, distinguishing between changes in rates and changes in the structure of school-to-work linkages. We find that the overall compositional shift towards higher educational levels did not have substantial effects on occupational allocation, yet the trends for younger and older workers, as well as for workers with different fields of study in the tertiary system, were fundamentally different. Our findings suggest that the features of educational expansion in Brazil – i.e., privatization, field of study concentration, and quality discrepancies – contributed to a weakening of the links between education and occupational systems.

Keywords
Linkages; Education; Occupations