Students from Normal (Tech) do as well in job market as peers

Study finds they are more likely than Normal (Academic) peers to get higher qualification

- Gabrielle Chan

Students from the Normal (Technical) stream fared the same as their peers from the Normal (Academic) track in the labour market, with little difference in employment, earnings, or wealth accumulation outcomes, a long-running cohort study has found.

The joint study by a former Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) economist and an NUS academic also showed that N(T) students were more likely than N(A) students to complete secondary school and attain a post-secondary qualification.

The study was published on May 22 as part of MTI's quarterly economic survey report.

It tracked between 17,000 and 21,600 students who sat the PSLE from 1993 to 1997, the years when the N(A) and N(T) courses were first offered. Among other things, it looked at their annual income data for 2015, when they were between 30 and 34 years old.

The findings challenge common perceptions about disparities between educational courses, and show that choosing a course based solely on perceived benefits might lead to adverse individual outcomes in some instances, said researchers.

For the study, researchers compared the outcomes of students whose PSLE scores were just below the cut-off for the N(A) stream with those of students who scored above the threshold and therefore could choose between N(A) and N(T).

For instance, researchers included in their study students who took their PSLE in 1993 and 1994 and scored below 149, thus qualifying for the N(T) stream, as well as students who scored between 150 and 159, who could choose between N(T) or N(A).

The key assumption in this approach was that students in both groups had similar individual abilities.

The study, conducted by Dr Siddharth George, assistant professor of economics at the National University of Singapore (NUS), and Ms Afiqah Suhaiemi, former lead economist at MTI, controlled for other variables such as gender, race, household income and age at the time of the PSLE exam.