This article explores the historically contingent and normative descriptions of vocational education and training (VET) as a low-status alternative in Australia's socio-economic process of skill and knowledge development. Rather than repeating well-rehearsed shibboleths, this retheorisation of how status works applies an institutional logics perspective as a novel addition to existing research in the sector. Historical reports and contemporary discourses sourced from submissions to a parliamentary inquiry into VET's status are used to determine which logics are used in the sector. They demonstrate that the sector's dominant institutional logics derive from the state, market and professional orders of society. These three share an emphasis upon the use of status to determine how organisations and individuals allocate limited and valuable attention to their operating environments. The institutional logics perspective provides a meta-theoretical challenge to traditional depictions of what status represents and, in turn, suggests how public policy can be re-imagined, thus improving the sector's standing and consequent value propositions.