A study was conducted to determine the effect of participation in vocational education on labor market experience immediately after high school. Data were gathered in March and April of 1980 while the young people were seniors in high school, and again two years later. The first wave of data contained various measures of education and grades in school, participation in extracurricular activities, family background, work attitudes, career aspirations, and test scores. The second wave contained a complete history of jobs held since 1980 and post high school educational experiences and earnings. Three measures of the respondents' labor market success--earnings in 1981, number of months in which the respondent worked in the period between June 1980 and February 1982, and average hourly wage rates during that 21-month period--were defined from the second wave interviews. Data were gathered on a subsample of 1,712 for earnings in 1981 and number of total months, and of 1,256 for wage rates from a total of 12,000 persons on whom longitudinal data were available. Some of the results were the following: (1) males earned an additional $1,800 per year, worked an additional 1.4 months, and got paid 70 cents more per hour than females; (2) the positive impact of vocational coursework on wage rates and earnings was larger for men than for women; (3) trade and technical or other vocational courses had a large positive effect on the wage rates and earnings of men but almost no effect on those of women; and (4) the only type of vocational training that seemed to yield a significant immediate economic return to women was business and sales. The study also found that higher mathematics test scores increased the earnings of women but not of men, while high vocabulary test scores had the opposite effect. (KC)