4.1 Occupational Matching and Long-Term Earnings Trade-offs
The divergence in wage profiles between dual-study completers and traditional academic graduates illustrates the complex relationship between skill specificity and career progression. Dual-study curricula emphasize early integration into firm processes, generating specific human capital that optimizes initial job placement and provides higher entry-level remuneration [2], [7]. However, secondary literature highlights a critical trade-off: highly specialized early competencies may provide diminishing returns as graduates advance beyond technical execution into strategic and cross-functional roles [7]. Conventional university pathways, by contrast, focus predominantly on broad conceptual foundations that facilitate broader occupational mobility and higher mid-career wage acceleration [2], [8]. Early-stage institutional advantages can therefore narrow over time as general human capital enables adaptive transitions across diverse market segments [7], [8]. A comprehensive assessment of these trajectories remains constrained by heterogeneity across industry sectors, variation in institutional employment protections, and differences in tracking periods across published studies. Future evaluations require standardized multi-year cohort observations to determine whether the initial earnings advantage of dual programs fully converges with conventional academic returns over the entire working life.