What Hope for the Forgotten Half? Explaining the Decline of Vocational Education

• In Event: Populism, Privilege, and the Complex Purposes of Public Education

Abstract

Across advanced democracies, as the share of youth entering higher education has edged over
50%, policymakers and politicians face a challenge of what to do about those left behind
(Marginson 2016; OECD 2017, 23–24; Goodhart 2017). The traditional option for this
“forgotten half” (Rosenbaum 2001; W. T. Grant Foundation 1988) is to enter vocational
education prior to entry to the labour market; this can reduce the chance of unemployment
and is preferable to leaving school early (Iannelli and Raffe 2007; Ryan 2001). If secondary
vocational education is the best hope for the forgotten half, however, recent international
trends offer considerable cause for concern. The share of enrolment in secondary vocational
programs has been declining steadily across a range of countries, including Germany, home
to the most storied vocational pathway which has long served as a model for political
economists (Culpepper and Finegold 1999; Hansen 1999; Heikkinen and Lassnigg 2015).
This decline is not uniform, however, and other German-speaking countries with similar
institutional set-ups have maintained stable enrolment shares. The same variation, albeit from
different starting points, is found amongst more liberal market economies. This pattern
presents scholars and policymakers with a puzzle: what explains this variation in decline?
And what does it imply about the prospects of vocational pathways for the forgotten half?
In this paper, I detail this puzzle and show why the prevailing account of secondary
vocational decline, which focuses on expansion of tertiary education, cannot explain the
unevenness of trends. I then set out two better candidates for explanations. The first, which
explains secondary vocational decline in terms of change in manufacturing employment, is
grounded in the prevailing “firm-centred” perspective on skill formation that has been
developed in comparative political economy (Busemeyer and Trampusch 2011; Hall and
Soskice 2001; Solga and Ulrich Mayer 2008). The second, which extends studies of the shift
to output-based education policy within political science (Martens, Nagel, and Windzio
2010), offers an alternative school-centred perspective on variation in vocational decline. I
outline a set of hypotheses arising from these theories and how I test these using newly
synthesized datasets of international, national and local data, and paired case studies, based
on fieldwork in four countries.

This paper focuses on findings concerning the significance of “equivalency policies”, a new
education policy type appearing in both more co-ordinated and more liberal market context as
they seek to manage the transition from mass secondary to mass tertiary education. These
policies govern the way that students can combine or move between vocational and tertiary
education, and have been implemented primarily by left-leaning parties, as a compromise that
resembles the strategies of these parties with regards to lower secondary education and school
choice (Haberstroh 2016). I show how the varied implementation of these policies and the
responses they initiate in students, school leaders and parents can explain different patterns
of vocational decline. By integrating this new form into existing theories, this paper can more
comprehensively explain uneven secondary vocational decline and also further develops our
understanding of political responses to the dilemmas of education reform in post-industrial
contexts (Andersson 2009).

Author

• Amelia Peterson, Harvard University