According to OECD, Germany has one of the lower attainments of tertiary education, at about 27%, only ahead of Hungary, Portugal, Czech Republic, and Italy in the “first world.” According to the link this includes both university bachelor’s degrees, as well as vocational certificates.
But I also know that they have a highly tracked system, and people generally get split into university-track based “high schools” like gymnasium, as well as more-vocationally-minded schools which might lead to an apprenticeship. My question is what is the reason why 27% seems rather low, and if it indeed includes vocational school, what percentage of each do people go to?
Also Switzerland has a similar system I think(?) but much higher, about 40%, why?
“Tertiary” doesn’t include all levels of vocational school, only the highest. The lower levels are equivalent to secondary education. Most plumbers and electricians will have a secondary-level degree.
And the why is greatly cultural: Germany has managed to keep those secondary-level vocational degrees valuable and avoid funneling everybody into university. From my point of view that’s definitely a feature and not a defect of the German system.
Germany and Switzerland have the alternative system of a formal “apprenticeship”, a three- or four-year training consisting of a combination of training in the workplace and in a trade school, terminating in standardized final examination and certification. Many trades which in the US are taught in colleges are here taught in a much more reality-based and hands-on system. During this time, the apprentices work part of their time in the companies offering the apprenticeship (and earn a wage rather than having to pay for their education). The companies offering the apprenticeship have to fulfill specific requirements and have to include a specific catalog of techniques to be taught for a specific trade, to ensure they offer a well-rounded education rather than just using the apprentices as cheap labor. What is called tertiary education is mainly seen as the entrance pass to universities and engineering schools.
Based on reading Wikipedia, it looks like the German secondary school system directly prepares the vocational track students for jobs in industry. Basically their vocational schooling is wrapped into what we’d call high school, while ours is more outside of it- you graduate high school THEN go to vocational/trade school.
I think it’s a how-you-count type issue, and is misleading.
If all things were equal, yes, but all things are rarely equal. Adult education (i.e., for anyone over 18 and no longer eligible for K-12 services) in most regions is uncoordinated, inconsistent, plagued by lousy, bogus private schools grubbing after federal financial aid dollars, and difficult to navigate. In many places the role of the community college with regard to CTE is unclear for students and the public, and adult ed which is attached to K-12 systems is usually woefully underfunded and inadequate. Programs often lag behind industry demands, and usually there is little if any cooperation between industry and educators.
Things have arrived at this state precisely because high schools more and more focused so much only on getting students into 4-year degree schools, which worked as long as we had the post WWII boom wherein private industry was willing to both train people from the entry-level and pay them a unionized, decent wage with decent benefits. But those conditions have dwindled away. We actually have a demand for mid-tier (i.e., less than two years of education/training) workers, but in most areas, the educational systems aren’t geared toward that well enough.
Well, for a friend of mine who got the Spanish version of tertiary vocational school back when it got invented:
FP I was you “here’s how to set up an electrical system that someone else has designed without killing yourself or the people who use it”, (this level also gave someone who had it access to FP II or to the last year of college-track HS; very few people ever did the switch to college-track this second way)
FP II was “here’s how to design an electrical system that will work safely and correctly”, (this level also gave those who had it access to college/university, same as someone who’d gone to college-track HS but one or two years later)
and FP III was “and now we’re supposed to do research, but since we’re the first people to do this in Spain we’ll just figure out how to do it as we go along”, which as I told him is pretty much the definition of research His class got to be completely experimental, both in the sense that the coursework was extremely hands-on and in that they were the pilot for the curriculum.
The situation that I described at length (in the post immediately before yours) is not really about the money. (In fact, the ease of getting federal financial aid after high school to attend some fly-by-night vocational training that doesn’t get you anywhere is part of the problem.) It’s something that has been gradually becoming more problematic, over decades, but right now it’s becoming particularly clear that, if high schools here could incorporate middle skills training, the way they do in Germany, we’d clearly benefit economically.
The most important things have already been mentioned, but maybe a little wrap-up is helpful. The key difference between the German system and other systems with higher rates of tertiary education (i.e., university) is that a lot of trades and professions which are taught in colleges and universities in other countries are taught in apprenticeships and vocational schools in Germany. That doesn’t mean the people who have such jobs are worse at what they do; it just means that the formal qualification which they received after completing their training was not issued in the form of a university or college degree, and therefore they don’t count towards tertiary education statistics. In German society, there is, consequently, less of a pressure to go to university; people with vocational qualifications rather than degrees can be very good in their jobs, make decent money, and are socially respected, rather than seen as losers who “didn’t make it”.
The system and social perception gradually changing, though. There is a lot of talk about Abitur (the high school diploma which, unlike other types of high school diplomas, qualifies the holder for direct entry into a university) rates, and there seems to be both a political will to increase the share of Abitur graduates, and an ambition of parents to put their children into Gymnasium (the type of high school which prepares students for the Abitur), rather than other high schools not geared towards university. Some people call that inclusion, others call it a case of lowering educational standards in the Gymnasium. But, economically, it has led to a perceptible shortage of vocationally trained workers, since many students who would have done an apprenticeship in the past are now heading for the Abitur instead.
Sorry, I didn’t mean that at all. I was just afraid that you were responding only to the first post, but that first post really required the further explanation of the second post to make sense.
So my son is 14. If we were living in Germany (and if his grades weren’t as good as they are), would he have to decide, right now, what he wants to do when he grows up? Because knowing him, I don’t see how that’s possible.
He wouldn’t have to decide on the exact profession later on, but it would be good if he had an idea if he wants to go to university or not. To be admitted to university you need a type of high school diploma qualifying to do so, and not all high school diplomas do. The traditional way of finishing high school to go on towards university afterwards is the Abitur, traditionally awarded by a type of high school called a Gymnasium (which has nothing to do with doing sports; the name is a reminder of the fact that in Ancient Greece, physical exercise and academic education went hand in hand and were done in the same facilities). The Abitur permits you to attend any university course afterwards; you would still need to pass admissions (which can be an entry exam administered by the university, or a minimum GPA requirement earnt in the Abitur), but without this diploma you’re not even legally allowed to enter university. In a way, the Abitur can be thought of as sitting somewhere between the American high school diploma and a Bachelor’s degree from a liberal arts college; it is intended to cover a broad range of subjects and also qualifies the holder to go directly to university courses which would be considered graduate school in America, such as law or medicine. Students are usually 18 or 19 years old when they graduate from Gymnasium.
That’s at least how the system worked traditionally. Nowadays it has become a bit more durchlässig (which literally means “penetrable” or “permeable” but is used in the political debate in Germany to describe making the boundaries between the different types of schools less strict and easier to transfer between them). There are, nowadays, also other types of high schools besides the Gymnasium which are allowed to award Fachabitur (officially called fachgebundene Hochschulreife: “subject-restricted readiness for university”) diplomas, which are essentially high school diplomas permitting the holder to go to university, but restricted to certain courses; e.g., a Fachabitur from a science-focussed high school would allow you to enter an engineering degree in university but not something from the humanities.
Things are different if you want to go to vocational school after high school - which, again, does not carry a cachet of loser; a lot of highly respected and decently paying professions which would be taught in college courses in other countries are taught vocationally in Germany, and that includes e.g. things such as entry-level jobs in banking. In such a case, you wouldn’t need to bother about university admissions and Abitur, and can go to another type of high school than the Gymnasium. More recently, though, it has become common e.g. for apprentice bank clerks to actually have an Abitur, even though that is not a legal qualification requirement.
So, in summary, your son would not have to decide the exact profession later on, but it would be helpful if he had a rough idea of whether he wants to do something which requires a university degree. In that case, he’d be well advised to attend a Gymnasium and get his Abitur. It’s not exactly a once-in-a-lifetime decision, though; it’s possible for grown-ups who change their mind to upgrade their high school diploma to the Abitur later on in evening schools. I suppose that’s a little bit of a pain, though.
Note also that these students are supposed to have it easier to go to another EU country now that in the past; a student with a Fachabitur would be considered equivalent in Spain to someone with a Bachillerato Técnico (the replacement of the old FPII), which gives access to university. Our first year of uni focuses on making sure that all students are up to par: while it would be inusual for someone with a degree in HVAC to study towards a law degree with intent to actually become a lawyer*, a German electrician whose Spanish was good enough would be able to enter law school in Spain. He’d need to work harder in the first year than someone coming from the Pure Humanities track in a college-oriented high school, but that’s exactly what the first year is for.
One of the reasons Spain’s % is 42% is that there is a lot of people who get a college degree “as general culture”, usually in the Humanities or from Business School, while actually having zero intent of using it professionally.
He would need to decide whether, at the moment, he wants to continue on a “school only” track, or whether he wants to try a more hands-on approach. There are possibilities to branch back into a collage/university-track education from an apprenticeship, by doing extra evening classes. Frequently, the employer supports such a track in qualified apprentices by extra time off and/or increased wages.
For example, my brother, who at 14 was totally fed up with school, started off with a telecommunication/ electronics apprenticeship, but through these extra classes, qualified for entrance to an engineering school, to eventually become an electronics engineer.
Not to steal your thunder, but the bolded and underlined part above is why I was saying upthread that it’s a how-you-count type issue, not a real divergence in tertiary education.
It is in fact a very, very huge divergency in tertiary education; it is a very, very huge divergency in secondary education as well. Yes, the difference stems in great part from how you define your degrees, but this doesn’t mean the difference isn’t real. I can already tell you that the US has a lot more doctors with quaternary education than Spain, Germany, Italy, France or Sweden: this is due to the fact that in the US medical school is always postgraduate whereas in those other countries it is rare for a doc to have an actual doctorate, but it also happens to be 100% true.
The US also expects people to come out of college with a general education to the point of being able to graduate without declaring a major (and you call the educational level a bachelor’s), whereas other countries expect their HS graduates to have a general education (and the educational level’s name often has the same root as “bachelor’s”) and require university students to choose a specific “major” before they even enroll. This is a huge cultural difference, our expectations about HS and university are extremely different at the root. They’re also completely real, and highly likely to cause enormous confusion on students and teachers crossing between the two kinds of system.
Now I know the school systems are dramatically different- kids get tracked early, and presumably follow those tracks straight through in Germany. In the US, the assumption is that everyone gets a one-size-fits-all generic education with some elastic in the waist. I suspect that’s probably some kind of populist relic of the late 19th/early 20th century.
What I’m talking about is this situation:
28% of German high school students go on to tertiary education, likely university. Meanwhile, another unspecified percentage got formalized vocational education that is NOT considered tertiary education. They graduate and go on to work in industry.
Meanwhile something like 42% of US high school students go on to tertiary education, which in the context of the OP, includes stuff like technical school and trade school, as well as semi-academic stuff like community college culinary degrees and the like, as well as university.
In the German scenario, most of the non-university attendees would have got that training under the vocational schooling.
So if you’re looking at it from the US perspective, the Germans include a lot of what we (in the US) consider tertiary education in their high school vocational education, so by saying that they have 28% tertiary education participation and the US has 42%, it’s misleading, as you’re* not counting the same things. *
In the US system, a student who graduates high school and goes to a 2 year culinary school program is counted as having attended tertiary education, while a German student who got the exact same training as part of their high school education would not. Yet at the end of the day, they’re equally prepared for their culinary career.
If you were to compare equivalent training, the numbers might be very different.
His class got to be completely experimental, both in the sense that the coursework was extremely hands-on and in that they were the pilot for the curriculum.