Training Regimes and Skill Formation in France and Germany An Analysis of Change Between 1970 and 2010

Abstract

How do educational systems prepare workers for the labor market? Stratification research has often made a distinction between two ideal-types: “qualificational spaces,” exemplified by Germany with a focus on vocational education, and “organizational spaces,” exemplified by France with a focus on general education. However, most studies that investigated this distinction did so by focusing only on the size of the vocational sector, not on whether graduates with a vocational degree actually link strongly to the labor market. Moreover, they often studied male workers only, ignoring potential gender differences in how school-to-work linkages are established. In this paper, we map the change in education–occupation linkage in France and Germany between 1970 and 2010 using an approach that can distinguish between changes in rates and changes in the structure of school-to-work linkages. Surprisingly, we find that the German vocational system in 1970 was not, on average, substantially more efficient in allocating graduates to specific occupations than the French system. This finding is a major departure from earlier results, and it shows that the differences between 1970’s France and Germany, on which the qualificational-organizational distinction is based, are smaller than previously assumed. Partly, this is due to the fact that the female labor force was omitted from earlier analyses. We thus show that ignoring the female workforce has consequences for today’s conception of skill formation systems, particularly because a large share of educational expansion is caused by an increase in female enrollment in (higher) education.

Coordinated Markets, School-to-Work Linkages, and Labor Market Outcomes in the European Union

“…Those results imply that the differences we see between younger and older workers are being driven by career mobility. This interpretation is consistent with the findings in Elbers, Bol, and DiPrete (2021), who showed that the age differences in linkage strength in Germany are driven largely by the experiences of women. We have established so far that countries differ in their linkage strength, that these differences remain after we take account of differences in the educational and occupational distribution of countries, and that country differences in linkage strength themselves vary de-pending upon the particular educational credential of interest.…”

“…Some of the differences in effects by age are probably driven by age-specific career processes, but others may reflect historical change. Elbers, Bol, and DiPrete (2021) demonstrated considerable change in the French skill formation system over a period of 40 years but less change in the German system. To disentangle these two sources of data over the broad set of countries studied here requires further improvements in available data even though the EU LFS data have provided a considerable advance in what we know.…”

“…The existing literature on skill formation systems has not always clearly differentiated between the impact of macro-structure on the marginal distributions and the impact of macro-structure on the coherence of the pathways linking educational and occupational positions as measured by the structure of association between education and occupation, net of the marginal distributions. This distinction can be very important in making sense of country differences and of changes in skill formation systems over time, as Elbers, Bol, and DiPrete (2021) showed in their analysis of differences over 40 years in the French and German skill formation systems.…”

“…Indeed, our understanding is still limited about how the matching of credentials to jobs varies across industrial countries and whether this variation is consistent with theoretical schemes for distinguishing the skill formation systems of different countries. DiPrete et al (2017), Bol et al (2019), and Elbers, Bol, and DiPrete (2021) have found that pathway structure matters for the value of educational credentials in the labor market. They showed that pathways differ in strength both within and between countries and that country differences vary depending on the credential in question.…”

“…As Elbers, Bol, and DiPrete (2021) showed, the theoretical distinction between organizational and credential spaces in Maurice, Sellier, and Silvestre (1986), which asserts a large difference between the pathway structure of France and Germany, turned out to largely be a story about the greater proportion of Germany non-tertiary workers who received a vocational education, not a story about stronger connectivity between these vocational credentials and specific occupational placement. A similar pattern may be at work in Table B.1; the relatively high variability in linkage for workers with non-tertiary engineering/manufacturing/construction training appears mostly to be a story about country differences in the educational and occupational distribution.…”