An apprenticeship that is going through a crisis

Excerpt from Why the German Model Looks More Successful By Guillaume Duval Publisher: People's Post and Telecommunications Press

The education system and the pattern of young people entering the labour market have long been important aspects of the difference between France and Germany. Apprenticeships are more prevalent in Germany, with fewer young people continuing their university education.

The important role of apprenticeships in France is well known, and the French are willing to adopt apprenticeships. However, without considering the workings of the German labour market, we cannot well understand the uniqueness and efficiency of the German education system. In Germany, employees in the industrial sector (especially manual workers) have a much higher status in society than in France. In addition, the actual internal promotion space is relatively open to young people who have just joined the workforce. However, in France, such opportunities are very remote for young people who are just starting to work. These characteristics of the labour market are rooted in German social values, and due to the differences between the French and German labour markets, france's desire to imitate the Form of Education of the German apprenticeship system is entirely fanciful.

However, this apprenticeship system is becoming increasingly unsustainable for Germany. The decline in the employed population, the difficulty of integrating the children of immigrants into German society, the increasing reluctance of enterprises to accept and train apprentices, and the gradual departure of Germans from studying science and technology to other disciplines are important factors threatening Germany's future.

Germany is one of the oldest developed countries that offer higher education to all. According to the OECD in 2009, 83 percent of the German population aged 55 to 64 with higher education (undergraduate and above) in these wealthier countries is 83 percent, compared with only 55 percent in France. For half a century, France has lagged very far behind in this regard. In the countries counted by the OECD, an average of 61% of people in this age group are highly educated, and Germany is far more than other countries. At this age group, countries in Scandinavia have a higher proportion of the educated population. We go back to apprenticeships in Germany, which are not what we think of as vocational education, or shorter than university education, and discounted. On the contrary, apprenticeship was a high-level form of education for manual labor, which played a very important role in the rapid reconstruction of post-war Germany and the strong development of German industry.

For more than a decade, the gap in education between France and Germany has narrowed satisfactorily. In 2009, the proportion of young people aged 25 to 34 with a university education or above was 86% in Germany and 84% in France in the same period. During these 15 years, France gradually narrowed the gap with the educated population in Germany. From 1995 to 2009, the proportion of young people aged 15 to 19 in France who went to school decreased, from 89% to 84%. This regression occurs mainly in boys, who attend school at less than 83 per cent. In Germany, however, this proportion was maintained at 88 per cent. However, compared with other developed countries, Germany has gradually lost its educational advantages. According to the OECD, the average proportion of young people aged 24 to 34 who receive more than undergraduate education is 82%. At this age group, 14 of the 35 countries participating in the comparison surpassed Germany. In the 55-64 age group, only four countries have a higher proportion of the population with higher education than Germany. 98% of young South Koreans have a bachelor's degree or higher, compared with 94% in the Czech Republic and Poland and 91% in Sweden.

The unexpected 2000 PISA survey

The slowdown in the development of education in Germany and the gradual loss of its advantages in education reflect the dissatisfaction with Germany's high public spending in the past decade or so, as well as the fact that the children of immigrants have difficulty integrating into Germany. Germany's poor performance in education has become a serious threat to its ability to maintain leadership in industrial development. In 2000, the OECD published the findings of the first PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) study. To assess students' reading comprehension and knowledge of math and science, the organization surveyed 180,000 15-year-olds in 32 countries that year. The results show that Germany is below average in these three areas. Moreover, German students receive the lowest grades among OECD countries. In the study, young French performed slightly better, but only slightly above the OECD country average. The two countries with the best results were South Korea and Finland. Germany is one of the countries where student achievement is most influenced by social origin or ethnicity. France is more affected by this because the French education system is more unequal. This gradual decline has a lot to do with the general poor performance of the descendants of immigrants, with Germany becoming the OECD country after Belgium that has the greatest impact on student achievement by socio-racial origins. As in France, the gender dimension of this phenomenon is very pronounced, and the proportion of boys among the children of immigrants who do not achieve good grades or even drop out of school is twice that of girls.

The German education system is grossly unequal, and even now the unified junior high school system has not been fully adopted. France has been implementing the system as early as 1970. In Germany, schools are organized by the cantons, so schools vary from state to state and cannot be unified at the national level. Moreover, there are three levels of lower secondary school in most states (one year before the start of France, equivalent to the last year of primary school in France). "Good" students go straight into secondary school, with 34% of students moving on to secondary school in 2010. Not surprisingly, these students are able to continue their higher education. The average student goes to a vocational secondary school, with 26 per cent of students entering a vocational secondary school in 2010. After that, they will receive vocational education. Moreover, the best performing students can re-enter the first year of secondary school. The most "bad" students go straight to vocational high school, and about 16 percent of them entered vocational high school in 2010, and they have to work once they finish their course. Some states (especially those in the former East Germany) adopted a unified junior high school system called a comprehensive school, which is what is known in France as a secondary school. In 2010, these schools enrolled only 11% of Germans. Compared to other schools, this proportion is slowly rising. In 2000, Germany's unexpectedly bad results in the PISA survey may have been the consequence of the bad consequences of the vocational high school mechanism against "bad" students.

Effective response

In France, the results of the PISA survey showed that the failure of the education system did not cause an uproar. Because everyone knows that such an education system has limitations and cannot achieve the effects that France wanted to achieve before, the results of the survey only confirm the ideas in people's minds. But in Germany, the results of the survey are diametrically opposed. In Martin? After Luther, at the end of the Middle Ages, under the influence of the Reformation, people began to aspire to literacy in order to study the Bible. Coupled with the printing technology invented by the German Gutenberg in 1452, Germany became the first European country to popularize reading and writing education. For more than 50 years, Germany still belongs to the developed countries in Europe with a high level of mass education. Moreover, as a country that deserves to attach great importance to education, Germany has a deep understanding of the importance of education in economic development.

In the 2000 PISA survey, it became the worst country in developed countries for middle school students, which is undoubtedly a huge gap for Germany. Even with a tight policy of tightening control over public spending, the German government is looking for ways to change this stigma. The first is to reduce the number of students responsible for each teacher, and the reduction of the German population has helped to realize this policy. In addition, the government encourages teachers to give more help to students with poor grades. In less than 10 years, this approach has had obvious results. According to the results of the 2009 PISA survey, Germany has recovered to a slightly higher position than the OECD national average in three grades (reading comprehension, mathematics and scientific knowledge), and ranks ahead of France. However, due to the social and racial reasons for the student performance gap, the impact in Germany is still higher than the OECD national average. However, Germany was less affected by this than France, which has since become the most obvious country in the world where social race is reflected in students' academic performance.

Fifteen years later, the gap between the education systems of Germany and France is even more pronounced. In 2009, 56 per cent of young people of French school age received general secondary education, compared with 47 per cent in Germany. In other words, 53% of young people of school age in Germany choose vocational secondary education, compared with 44% in France. However, almost all (85 per cent, or 45 per cent of all young people of school age in Germany) who choose vocational secondary education enter the field of work through apprenticeships, compared with no more than 12 per cent of young people in France per generation.

Apprenticeships, which still play an important role today, are closely related to what we have said earlier about the significant supporting role that business plays in German society. It is difficult to compare the apprenticeship systems between Germany and France, because the term "apprentice" has different meanings in both Germany and France. In France, "apprentices" often conjure up images of young people who volunteer to be slaughtered in businesses, who are responsible for cleaning and pouring coffee for others, even if that is changing. But in Germany, apprentices are able to really integrate into the system and are well managed and trained in their career development, and they are more protected than the so-called French apprentices who were eliminated by the education system, and it is this training system that makes young people in Germany today.

An apprenticeship that is going through a crisis

However, the apprenticeship system, which was envied and envied by outsiders, was experiencing a deep crisis within Germany. Since the 1990s, German companies have been offering fewer apprenticeships. As Europe and the world are experiencing, German companies are experiencing short-term budget constraints, and the future of these apprentices is uncertain, making them increasingly reluctant to invest in this kind of human capital. Training an apprentice does not seem to be of any benefit to the short-term interests of the enterprise, even if the salaries of these apprentices are much lower in Germany than in France, as they are for regular employees. The point of training apprentices is simply that they can be hired by the enterprise and stay in the enterprise for the rest of their lives. However, more and more businesses are not providing apprentices with assurances of eventual employment, and their career development is becoming increasingly uncertain. Due to the high uncertainty of the future, reforms in various industries have also made apprenticeships less attractive to businesses. As manual work was gradually replaced by machines, the foundation of apprenticeship, hand-to-hand teaching, gradually lost its meaning. In order to master industrial programs, it is more necessary to understand the working principles of machines, which requires more systematic theoretical education.

These reasons have led to an uneven development of demand and supply for apprenticeship jobs. To stop this, Germany introduced an apprenticeship tax in 2004, in which companies that fail to accept a sufficient number of apprentices pay a fine as compensation. In addition, German companies are increasingly adopting inter-firm apprenticeships, gradually replacing intra-firm apprenticeships, which has become a dominant trend. This change profoundly changed the form of education in the apprenticeship system. At the same time, the State brings together young people who have completed their schooling but have not yet found apprenticeships to provide them with further employment solutions. Despite the sluggish labor market, the mechanism accepted 300,000 young people who had just entered the workforce in 2012. In short, apprenticeships contributed to the success of the German economy, especially industry, but the future of this mechanism in Germany remains unpredictable, let alone in France.

The best way for young people to integrate into the labour market

Apprenticeships live up to expectations. In 2011, the unemployment rate for young people aged 15 to 24 was 8.6 percent in Germany and 22.1 percent in France. Germany, Austria and the Netherlands have adopted very similar education systems and are the only EU countries with a youth unemployment rate of less than 10%. For 29 years, Germany's youth unemployment rate has remained below 10 percent for 10 years, while France has been able to keep it below 20 percent for only seven years. Here we only consider youth unemployment, and if we take into account all young people aged 15 to 24, not just those who are looking for work or already have a job, then the gap is even more pronounced. In 2011, 8.4% of all young people were unemployed in France and 4.5% in Germany, only one-second of France. Of course, demographic differences are also important reasons for explaining the gap. The total number of young people in Germany is 730,000, accounting for the total labor force. 1.8% of the population; France has 800,000, accounting for 3% of the total labor force. This is also a big gap.

Apprenticeships are not the only reason why young Germans are well placed to enter the labour market. German students have a lot of time to do odd jobs during school, because the pressure of schoolwork is not too great, and the school hours are not so tight. This opportunity allows German students to learn more about the labor market than French students. Moreover, many German students stop their studies and go to work halfway through and then resume their studies. In France, suspension of schooling is punishable. This makes German students generally more mature than French students, because they are exposed to social life earlier and are more fully prepared to enter the labour market when they graduate. In addition, German schools avoid cramming education, and young people are not as competitive in academic performance as in France. This facilitates cooperation and creativity for German students, thus providing favorable conditions for German students to be able to easily enter the labour market.

In addition, the creativity of the German education system is expressed in higher education. Germany has one of the lowest proportions of higher education of all developed countries, and the growth rate is very slow. In 2009, only 25.7 percent of Germans aged 25 to 34 chose to pursue higher education, compared with 25.3 percent of Germans aged 55 to 64 years old, and only 0.4 percent over the past 30 years. Only two of the developed countries , the United States and Israel — are growing very slowly. However, this ratio is much higher in both countries than in Germany. In France, by contrast, the proportion is only 18% among 55- to 64-year-olds, and almost more than 43% of young people aged 25 to 34. This is mainly due to the fact that France has a higher technician education and a technical university education. As a result, France is one of the fastest growing numbers of young people in higher education among OECD countries, with its share growing from 22 per cent to 37 per cent. But Germany's system of higher education, with only a few elites, does not seem to have had a negative impact on Germany's industrial competitiveness.

The number of engineers has grown weakly

In any case, Germany's industrial development still encountered some difficulties, that is, the number of engineers and researchers was difficult to meet the needs of industrial growth. This is mainly due to the increasing choice of young Germans to study law, social sciences, humanities and business. The Verein der Deutschen Ingenieure (VDI) has pointed out that in 2011, 65,000 engineer positions could not find suitable candidates, and this gap has been expanding rapidly since 2000.

Can immigrants fill this gap in the future? The economic crisis in southern European countries has triggered a wave of young people in these countries looking for work in Germany. However, this does not seem to fill the demand for talent in the German economy in science and technology. Due to language reasons, it is difficult for Germany to make good use of these influx of talents. On the contrary, the influx of talent into the United States compensates well for the weakness of American educational institutions. It also became a major obstacle to the continued success of the German economy.

In general, the number of young people in the German population structure is relatively small, and the German students spend significantly less time in school than French students (6300 hours for German students aged 7 to 14, and 7400 hours for French students), apprenticeships occupy an important position in Germany, but the proportion of people who continue to receive higher education is relatively small, including of course that the public expenditure on education in Germany is lower than in France, although German teachers receive higher salaries than French teachers. In 2008, public spending on education in Germany accounted for 4.8% of the country's GDP, and France's 6% of the country's GDP. This is an important gap in public spending between the two countries. In terms of GDP per capita, France's public spending on primary, junior high and high schools exceeds Germany by 13%, 30% and 21% respectively. This gap culminates in short-term higher education (french higher technical education and technical university education), which surpasses Germany by 57%. However, in terms of long-term higher education, Germany has slightly more than France. As we have discussed earlier, this meager investment in collective education is directly related to gender inequality and the low birth rate that threatens the future of the country. Although this has not had a significant negative impact on the competitiveness of German industry so far, it is difficult to say that this negative impact will not be slowly manifested in the future.

Considering that there are not so many young Germans who continue to pursue higher education as young people in France, if they no longer continue the career path of apprenticeship, it will have a non-negligible impact on the labor market.

However, Germany has a much higher social value for industry and manual labor than France. In the case of strong trade union organization, the social relations within German industry organizations are well regulated, and the rights of employees at the bottom of society are more effectively protected than in France. In addition, the reason why Young people in France are not as willing to accept apprenticeships as young people in Germany is that apprenticeships often have little prospect in France. In Germany, even from the lowest level, apprentices have the opportunity to advance within the company. For example, Jorgen Berger, who was president of the Mercedes-Benz Group, a German industrial giant from 1995 to 2005, was the head of the Mercedes-Benz Group. Jürgen Schrempp started as an apprentice in mechanical engineering and rose to the top leadership position in the Mercedes-Benz Group. Such an experience is simply unimaginable in France. Of course, even in Germany, such stories are relatively rare. In general, the top leaders of large companies are university doctorates (in Germany, obtaining a university doctorate automatically enjoys an honorary title).

Higher social mobility in business

Germans are not as fortunate as the French, and there are "big schools" where top managers of German companies generally graduate from public universities, which also makes German business executives more autonomous and mature. In France, this restriction on the subsequent career due to origin has also become one of the main obstacles to its attempt to imitate the German model. Germany represents a very special form at the international level, even though the German education system (including the French education system) has more inequalities than other countries, but Germany's social mobility is higher than in other countries, and the income inequality between generations in Germany is effectively controlled compared to other countries. This phenomenon is very pronounced in Finland and Denmark, similar in Sweden, Canada and Germany, while it rarely occurs in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This explains why, in German companies, employees who start at the bottom also have the opportunity to take up leadership positions. In addition to the strong power of german trade unions, another important factor in the success of German industry is the opportunity for promotion within the enterprise. In contrast, in French enterprises, career limitations and the existence of strict hierarchies based on academic qualifications have become the main factors hindering the development of the French economy.