Public secondary technical education in Costa Rica: 1950-2014

Abstract

Public Technical Secondary Education is a Costa Rican educational modality, conceived as an alternative for the early insertion of the young population in the labor market. Despite its importance at the national level, it is not a central theme of existing academic research about the education system, which rather addresses aspects such as the technical offer of the Instituto Nacional de Aprendizaje, technical specialties, the labor market and evaluation by competences -among others -, leaving aside the formulation, orientation and execution of the Technical Education policy itself. This article arises as a result of a research study to opt for the Bachelor of Social Work degree from the University of Costa Rica, and aims to reconstruct the main elements of the Costa Rican policy of Secondary Technical Education, developed by the Ministry of Public Education (MEP), in the period 1950-2014. The reconstruction is guided by a model of public policy analysis, based on General Systems Theory, and with a mixed methodology of qualitative preponderance of descriptive and exploratory scopes. The population participating in the study is made up of five professionals from MEP with experience in the formulation and implementation of the Technical Education Policy from three different scenarios: educational centers; the Direction of Technical Education, Capacities and Entrepreneurs; and the ministerial function. The main technique for collecting information corresponds to the documentary analysis of the annual reports of MEP's work from 1950-2014, which is complemented by semi-structured interviews with MEP’s professionals. The research concludes that Secondary Technical Education is more an approximation to the labor market than a real guarantee of insertion in it, since the target market is unable to absorb all the labor that is formed