From Classrooms to Career: Can Mexico See Its Own Students?

and0140 Wed, 07/01/2026 - 12:19 July 1, 2026 Mexico's upper secondary technical education system is enormous. It serves more than 5.5 million students across 31 distinct subsystems, from large industrial campuses in major cities to small agricultural and maritime schools scattered across rural states ( SEMS, 2024 ). These schools are meant to do something difficult: hand a young person both an academic diploma and a technical credential that opens a real door into formal, quality work. In 2023 to 2024, the technological baccalaureate alone enrolled close to 1.9 million students, about 34 percent of all upper secondary enrollment ( SEMS, 2024 ). For many students, that door is tested before they graduate. Around 40 percent of upper secondary students are already working, and after they turn 19 the probability of seeking employment jumps from roughly 44 percent to 72 percent ( INEGI, 2025 ; INEGI, 2026 ). The question is not whether these students are entering the labor market but what kind of work they enter, and whether the system that trains them can even see what happens next. The answer, for now, is mostly no, and that gap in visibility is the problem we set out to study with Mexico's Subsecretaría de Educación Media Superior (SEMS), the federal body that governs upper secondary education. A labor market that is not built for young people The jobs young Mexicans find are often precarious. Among employed youth aged 15 to 29, nearly 59 percent work informally, about 4.5 points above the national average ( INEGI, 2025 ). For those aged 15 to 19, roughly 72 percent hold informal jobs and 48 percent earn less than one minimum wage per month ( INEGI, 2026 ). Six in ten young people say their main barrier to work is a lack of experience which is the familiar trap of needing a job to get the experience that gets you a job ( ManpowerGroup and JA Americas, 2024 ). The most striking insight is students often choose the most visible job available to them. A randomized experiment with vocational graduates in San Luis Potosí found that young people systematically underestimate how fast formal wages grow, sometimes believing they rise under 10 percent in the first six months when the real figure is closer to 25 percent ( Abel et al., 2022 ). They also discount future earnings heavily, so a small wage today outweighs a better trajectory tomorrow. International research agrees that the employers who happen to be visible shape student choices, independent of what the wage data would recommend ( Acton, 2021 ). Without support to weigh their options, many students are not making bad decisions so much as decisions with the wrong information. Here the school-to-work transition stops being only a labor market problem and becomes an educational one. Economic pressure is among the leading reasons students drop out. Upper secondary schools already carry the highest dropout in the system; of every 100 students who enter primary school, only 54 finish upper secondary ( SEMS, 2024 ). Dropout in the technical track runs about 11 points higher than in general high schools, 37 percent against 26 percent, even though the technical track is meant to offer a faster route into work. The students with the most economic need sit precisely where the bridge between school and work is weakest. Who gets to know what happens to students? We began intending to run a quantitative analysis linking education outcomes to regional labor markets, and we could not, because the data does not yet exist in usable form. SEMS holds individual records for fewer than a quarter of its enrolled students, roughly 1.2 million of 5.5 million, about 22 percent ( Gobierno de México, 2025 ; SEMS, 2024 ). The data that does exist usually stops the moment a student enters the labor market. No subsystem systematically asks incoming students about their interests or whether they already work, and no shared infrastructure links students to internships, social service, or jobs after graduation. The contrast across subsystems is sharp. CONALEP (National College of Professional Technical Education) has tracked graduates since 1999 through four instruments following students up to five years out ( CONALEP, 2018 ). DGETAyCM (General Directorate of Agricultural Technological Education and Marine Sciences), which runs hundreds of rural campuses, has no formal follow-up at all; in its own leadership's words, any knowledge of where graduates end up is anecdotal. The one national tracer survey, ENILEMS (National Survey of Job Placement for High School Education Graduates), was discontinued after 2019, not because it failed, but because the formal request INEGI (National Institute of Statistics and Geography) needs to run it was never resubmitted ( INEGI, 2019 ). The result is a system that cannot measure its broken transition; what they lack is evidence to act with precision. They cannot say which programs, subsystems, or regions produce good transitions, because the information lives in fragmented internal systems or is never collected. This is the quiet version of a problem across the modern economy: when institutions cannot see what happens to the people they serve, policy follows whatever evidence is available rather than what is true. A school system that cannot track its graduates cannot improve their outcomes. It can only guess. A rare window There is a rare policy window that brings this issue into stark relief. Since 2022, SEMS has been consolidating its 31 subsystems into two unified pathways under a single Common Curricular Framework ( SEMS, 2024 ; SEP, 2025 ). This is a once-in-a-generation reform and the first moment when national standards for guidance, graduate tracking, and employer engagement could be built in at once. Our central argument is that SEMS need not invent new institutions but that it needs to connect and standardize what it already holds, which matters in a year when its budget was cut 3.9 percent with no dedicated funding line for career guidance ( Lugo, 2026 ). We make four recommendations. First, standardize career guidance across all three years rather than cramming it into the final semester, reviving the MOVO model SEMS built in 2018 but never made mandatory and extending training to the teachers and counselors who deliver it ( SEMS, 2018 ); the evidence is consistent that structured, multi-component guidance beats one-off, end-of-program interventions ( Weiss and Bloom, 2022 ). Second, expand the existing student data system, SIGED, to cover more students and capture internships, social service, and employment status, with a binding deadline for federal subsystems to submit complete records. Third, institutionalize graduate tracking through a formal INEGI partnership, using the CURP (Unique Population Registry Code) identifier that already underpins longitudinal tracking for over 10 million Benito Juárez scholarship students ( CNBBBJ, 2025 ), reactivating ENILEMS on a fixed schedule and harmonizing CONALEP's strong tracking model across subsystems. Fourth, simplify employer onboarding so a company registers once instead of negotiating separately with each subsystem, a friction that falls hardest on the small and medium firms that drive regional labor markets. None of these requires new legislation, and with one exception none requires new budget; each builds on an active reform, an existing platform, or a precedent already within SEMS's authority. Takeaways Before SEMS can improve students' transitions into formal work, it has to be able to see those transitions in the first place. The reform now underway is usually described as a curricular project, a question of what students learn. We argue it should also be treated as an institutional one, a question of what the system can know about its own students. The window is open now, and it will not stay open forever. Mexico's technical schools already shape the working lives of millions of young people; whether they can be steered toward better outcomes depends on something less visible than curricula or campuses, namely whether the institutions governing them can finally see what becomes of the students who pass through. This post draws on our Policy Analysis Exercise, “From Classrooms to Career: Scoping Mexico’s Technical Upper Secondary School-to-Work Transitions,” completed with the Subsecretaría de Educación Media Superior. Nidhi Nair Renata Millet From Classrooms to Career: Can Mexico See Its Own Students? Contact Nidhi Nair and Renata Millet