<p>I constantly hear srange things about the college system in Germany. This is one quote I recently read, that basically mirrors a lot of other things I've read. I have no idea where to ask so I thought I'd start here. Is this true??</p>
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In Germany kids at the High School level are placed in one of two paths, pre college or trades preparation, guess what happens if they decide you are not college material, you NEVER get go to college for the rest of your life.
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<p>That’s almost true. It is true that children get tracked after 4th grade, and that you cannot go to college with a vocational high school degree. There does exist an option to add on 3 years of schooling on top of the vocational high school diploma to get a college entrance credential, but that’s so inconvenient that few people ever do it.</p>
<p>Very few people go to college in Germany at all. I believe that less than 10% of the adult population have a college degree: those are the doctors, lawyers and engineers. Nurses, accountants, IT professionals, etc are trained through the vocational school system, so it’s not really necessary to go to college to have a career. The working class sees no need to send their kids to college at all. There are financial incentives to go through the vocational system rather than the academic system: If you become an accountant, you’d be paid while in training and start earning money at age 16. If you wanted to be a tax lawyer, you wouldn’t earn money until you’re 24. </p>
<p>Most college-educated professionals don’t earn enough to justify 8 additional years of schooling solely on the basis of income. College vs no college in Germany is mostly a matter of social status.</p>
<p>Thank you very much. That’s very interesting. I’ve tried to do some research for myself but am not having very much luck. </p>
<p>The system is completely different then…but still certain careers would be shut off if not for university. </p>
<p>This link below seems to suggest that there is an option for older or nontraditional students who want to pursue university to do so through adult school or assessment tests…is it correct?</p>
<p>[The</a> Educational System in Germany](<a href=“http://academic.cuesta.edu/intlang/german/education.html]The”>http://academic.cuesta.edu/intlang/german/education.html)
"Those who are already employed but never had a chance to attend or complete a Gymnasium or Fachoberschule may also qualify for university or college study. They can obtain an Abitur certificate or equivalent through special adult education or by passing an assessment test. These alternatives are know as der zweite Bildungsweg, the “second route to higher education”</p>
<p>Or can you take a trade school certificate and transfer to a university eventually? Does Germany have something similar to the US’ community college system?</p>
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Yes, that’s what I meant when I said that there exists “an option to add on 3 years of schooling on top of the vocational high school diploma to get a college entrance credential, but that’s so inconvenient that few people ever do it.”</p>
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Sometimes, under very restricted circumstances. For example, some states allow adults with vocational credentials and several years of work experience to go to college for a specific major (usually building up on their vocational training) after passing an exam, showing that they have the requisite academic background (e.g. in math) to succeed in the college program. </p>
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It depends which aspect of the community college system you care about. There are no institutions scattered around the countryside which offer courses that would transfer to a university. However, a university education is free in Germany, alleviating the need for a “cheaper” community college-transfer route.</p>
<p>Thank you for your patience with me 
This is all very new and interesting to me</p>
<p>I just read a report on OECD countries’ college completion rates and Germany is lower than the US. However, these studies often include junior college degrees (such as 2 year associate’s degrees), rather than just bachelor’s…and considering that Germany has such a distinguished vocational school system, it seems like it would be hard to determine which would qualify as a college degree and which wouldn’t for the parameters of these studies. </p>
<p>It’s probably extremely rare then for a person to decide to do a total career change later in life…like going from teaching to law or medicine…something which is possible in the US and other countries. </p>
<p>Would becoming a high school teacher require a university degree or just vocational school?</p>
<p>I remember reading that OECD reort and comparing it to statistics about education credentials in Germany. I believe that the OECD study counted anything higher than an apprenticeship as college-educated in Germany, which comes out to 20%-25% of the adult population. The most common credential in that category is the permission train apprentices, followed by American-style college degrees. </p>
<p>If apprenticeships were also counted as a college education (nurses, accountants, technicians, kindergarten teachers… are all trained through apprenticeships), then a whopping 75% of the adult population would be college educated.</p>
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High school teachers at the pre-college high schools and for academic subjects at the vocational high schools are college educated. Vocational subject teachers (business, technical subjects, culinary arts, etc) usually went through the vocational system themselves.</p>
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That’s a very good point and my biggest issue with the German system: it’s extremely difficult to change careers. Apprenticeship positions are almost exclusively offered to teenagers, getting a college education might require a different high school credential plus 5 years of full-time study, and there’s even an age-limit (somewhere in the 40s) for becoming an employee of the state. (That’s similar to age limits for joining the military in the US, but for civil servant positions like public school teachers, policemen and even government administrative assistants.)</p>
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<p>Source please!</p>
<p>As far as I know most foreign countries put kids to different tracks starting at 10 grade (when high school begins). I think Germany and France adopt this approach.</p>
<p>coolweather, I normally have a lot of respect for you on this forum, but don’t you think it’s silly to challenge a German on the basic structure of the German school system? </p>
<p>In the time it took you to pose the question, you could have easily found this yourself: [Education</a> in Germany - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Germany]Education”>Education in Germany - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>The first sentence of the section on “Secondary Education” states
Emphasis mine. I didn’t list the 4th “option” because it doesn’t exist in many states, yet several other prominent options (e.g. Wirtschaftsschulen, private schools or public schools for children with special needs) got omitted.</p>
<p>The first sentence in the second paragraph of the section on “Tertiarty Education” states
Exceptions are handled by the individual states (e.g. licensed professionals with x years of work experience might be allowed to study their own subject at a university without Abitur.) </p>
<p>If Wikipedia is not trustworthy enough, I can give you official sources too. Here is the text of the state law regulating access to public and state-accredited universities in the state of Bavaria: [Verordnung</a> über die Qualifikation für ein Studium an den Hochschulen des Freistaates Bayern und den staatlich anerkannten nichtstaatlichen Hochschulen](<a href=“Startseite BayernPortal - Für Bürger - BayernPortal”>Startseite BayernPortal - Für Bürger - BayernPortal) </p>
<p>And here does a state agency advise parents on how to pick a secondary school for their child after 4th grade: [Staatliche</a> Schulberatung in Bayern](<a href=“Staatliche Schulberatung in Bayern”>Staatliche Schulberatung in Bayern)</p>
<p>^My bad. I read that link too. Somehow I read age 10 as grade 10. I could not make the linkage between age 10 and grade 4.
And that is a silly system.</p>
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Why? It’s a system that aims to give every child an education that will be of immediate use to him or her. The American system - where families spend a fortune on a liberal arts education that will leave the student unemployed as well as not much wiser, and which has fostered a culture where careers that do not build up on a college education are considered inferior - seems much sillier to me.</p>
<p>@coolweather</p>
<p>The alternative is that rich kids, regardless of achievement, get to go to college and warm their asses in some corporate seat, and the poor kids get to go to some form of trade school and work a 9 to 5, or go to college incurring massive debts and end up working a 9 to 5 anyway. The fact is, competitive college admission will always leave some people out of the loop, but it’s better if they do so based on merit.</p>
<p>… not to mention that the German system assures that even non-academic types can have excellent skills that lead to excellent jobs. Much harder to accomplish that here.</p>
<p>vienneselights, you have a good point that the German system looks like it is merit-based from the outside; but if you look at the sociology of it, it’s pretty obviously not based on “merit”. Doesn’t Germany have one of the lowest ‘social mobility’ scores (measured by college completions) in all of Europe? Children of college-educated parents almost always go to college, and children of non-college-educated families are not very likely to go to college either. </p>
<p>That’s completely fine with me though. The child of a farmer may not be raised to value academics as much as the child of a professor or lawyer; but the child of a farmer is probably not gonna want to pursue an intellectual career anyway. Heck, my mom is upset to this day that personal circumstances forced her to get a college education and pursue a white collar career; she would have much rather inherited her parents’ farm or done another type of blue collar work. She enjoys working outside and getting her hands dirty.</p>
<p>What’s special about the German education system, in my opinion, is that you don’t need a college education to make a good living. The vocational system is a very legitimate way to get an education; and it assures that most people get an education that will be useful to them. katliamom expressed this very succinctly in the previous post. </p>
<p>The German system does have its own set of disadvantages (e.g. the relative difficulty of changing careers later in life) but dismissing the concept as “silly” (as coolweather did) seems blind to the challenges that “equal opportunity” academic-centered systems like that in the US are struggling with.</p>
<p>@barium</p>
<p>firstly, all my german friends say that if your parents are college-educated, they will do their utmost to get you to university. obviously, for precisely the reasons you stated. parents cannot want for their children that which they don’t understand. secondly, why must academic merit immediately translate to social mobility? we are no longer in the age of talmudic hierarchies, where people who have knowledge prosper simply because it’s so rare; in the age of reason, easily quantifiable virtues such as wealth are the measure of social standing.</p>
<p>that said, i heard on the grapevine that a californian plumber can pull in 200k per annum. probably lies, but with a grain of truth: blue-collar service jobs that require extensive technical training, such as automechanicking etc., I hear, have become quite lucrative since this post-secondary education craze came into being.</p>
<p>I can appreciate that Germany’s system is more practical in terms of ensuring jobs for people and not saddling them down with crippling debts in exchange for degrees that won’t lead to an actual job. I can also appreciate that in Germany, a university degree is not necessary to have a good life. </p>
<p>However, it seems to me that part of it is just semantics as well as the result of the integral differences in the system. Firstly, like Barium mentioned, a lot of professions that would require a uni degree in the US simply don’t in Germany, so part of it is just a superficial difference in how the US and Germany define what is vocational vs a university-required field. Secondly, Barium also states that while there are options available to attain a college entrance credential and enter university in a nontraditional way (with additional schooling), it is considered “inconvenient” and rarely taken, which makes sense - why would most people “inconvenience” themselves when you can make a perfectly good living in Germany with vocational schooling?</p>
<p>But not only does Germany’s system make it difficult to change careers, it also stagnates social mobility and limits the opportunities for “late bloomers”. </p>
<p>Look, I don’t think that a college education is the right path for everyone, but I also don’t think you should have to figure out your life plan by the time you’re in middle school, nor should you have to go straight to university right after high school if you have no idea what you want to do. It depends on your individual situation. </p>
<p>I was a fairly good student in high school, who took honors and AP classes, but I wasn’t always the most motivated. I only attended 1 semester of university before dropping out because I felt like I was wasting time and money when I had no direction. I am now returning in my early 20’s with much more maturity, responsibility and a clear career goal that I’m passionate about (and have done lots of research about, from every angle including financial). Because of my situation, I have to start at the community college level, where I encounter tons of lingering students who have wasted away years and accumulated endless credits (many with bad GPA’s) without any direction nor are they any closer to transferring.
But I also meet many other people in similar circumstances to mine, who discovered quite late what they wanted to do, but are driven to accomplish our goals. So yes, there are many flaws with the US system, but I shudder to think that in another country I (and others like me) would be shut out of university altogether based on my decisions early on. And ideally, I love the idea that people can pursue higher education at any age or any point in their life. So basically for me, no system is perfect, but I’m grateful I have the option available to me. </p>
<p>Also, I’m not quite sure about Germany’s demographics, but the US’ I would assume are a bit more complicated than most, let’s say, “homogeneous” countries. You guys have already started to discuss how children of college educated parents statistically have higher university completion rates than children whose parents didn’t graduate - and sure, that might not be such a big deal in Germany where non-college graduates can still lead a good life. But it gets more complicated than that when you have to figure in the history of different ethnic groups and social inequality, etc. IDK this is a really huge topic and now I’m just rambling aimlessly…but I hope I’m making at least some sense.</p>
<p>vienneselights, I don’t disagree (in spirit) with anything you said. No one claimed that Americans are systematically screwed without a college education. However, it is true that many more middle class career paths require a costly college education in the US than in Germany. Germany has a systemic non-academic educational track to help “non-academically minded” youngsters make a good living for themselves. Germany, unlike the US, also doesn’t expect students/families to take on the financial risk of an education themselves; society pays for everyone’s education.</p>
<p>Re merit: maybe I misunderstood what you meant when you implied that the German system is somehow more merit-based than the American. Would you like to elaborate what exactly is more merit-based in the German system, and how you understand merit?</p>
<p>slidan302, those are some very good and valid points. (To alleviate one of your concerns: if you took AP and honors classes in high school, you would have probably been tracked pre-college in Germany. Once you have a college entrance credential, you always have the option to go to college, immediately or 20 years later.) I do share your concern about demographics and “systematic discrimination” against some parts of the population. First- and second generation immigrants in particular tend to fare rather poorly in the current tracking system. </p>
<p>I don’t expect that an early tracking system would work well in the US. I do however wish that the US would get over their “college craze”.</p>
<p>I was in a country that put children into career paths early. Some kids were put into vocational schools at 8th grade. Most kids were put in 3 different tracks for high school in 10th grade. These 3 tracks lead to 3 different career paths in college majors: 1- math and physical sciences, 2- biomedical sciences, and 3- social sciences and humanities. I chose the 3rd track. I enjoyed it but later I regretted because I changed my mind in career option. I wanted to have a STEM career instead but I could not apply anywhere because the STEM colleges did not take my HS diploma. I felt I could handle a STEM major (I studied math, physics, chemistry, and biology myself) but I was hopeless.</p>
<p>Luckily I was able to come to the US and I could choose to major in computer engineering and I have been successful so far. That’s why I don’t like to force children to pick a career path early in life.</p>
<p>Another thing I want to mention is the kids who went to vocational schools did not have any advantage over who chose college prep HS but were not able to attend colleges (only a small percentage of students could go to college in my former country). They all had the same career options after HS because the vocational schools did not prepare much for real life jobs.</p>
<p>Certain states in Germany have kept the three-tier system, which divides children up at the age of eleven. The highest level, Gymnasium, leads to a university education directly, the two lower ones usually into apprencticeships. However, in grade 5, 6 and 7 a child can change the school stream without any problems.
What has been growing enormously in the last 15 years are the so-called “berufliche Gymnasien”. Students from the two lower systems enter these schools at the age of 15, 16 or 17 instead of choosing an apprenticeship. Right now, about half of the students at university in my state get their education this way. They can specialize in business, IT, biology etc, but still do all other subjects and can choose any major they like at university.
Another track that has proved to be very successful is to do an apprenticeship at 15 or 16. It takes three years, then you can go back to school and get your Abitur in one or two years. Going to college this way makes a lot of sense because you have a good practical basis in your field e. g. engineering. And, as a student, who can do qualified work for some hours a week at decent wages and do not have to work at a fast-food place.
I work with many people who have started their careers that way and then got their Master’s or doctorate degrees.
Right now about half of the population born in 1990 to 1992 go to university. About 40 years back it was about 5 %.
I do agree with some of the other posts that the system makes the German job market very inflexible and career changes are difficult. You are expected to stay in your path. On the other hand most people have vocational qualifications of some sort. A hairdresser needs a three-year apprenticeship and must learn the chemical process of hair-coloring. After the apprenticeship you take your exam and you are a skilled person in your field. You can even go to the Meisterschule or Technikerschule (one year) and get a "Meister"qualification. In many cases these degrees are equivalent to certain college degrees in the US (e.g. optician).
So, there are some good and some negative aspects in the system. But, it is not a class-ridden system. University is free and so are all the schools. Students from low-income families get Bafög, that means financial support from the government for their living expenses. Half of the money comes as a grant, the second half has to be paid back, but is interest-free.</p>
<p>It is true that kids are selected (mostly by teachers) into different performance groups aged 10 or 12.</p>
<p>Later-on they still can change and this also happens (not very often but also not rarely).</p>
<p>Intelligent parents have more intelligent kids in average. The left-wing activists in rage believe that this cannot be true. I am social-liberal and I vote conservative-liberal. I have not much sympathy for the lefties. I live in a millionaires’ quarter, people here have very high education or not even studied at all. Many ways lead to Rome.</p>
<p>Skilled workers (non-academics) earn well in Germany, no matter what some might tell you. We have a very broad and strong middle class compared to most regions in the US. I am absoluetyl sure that our education system is very fair towards everybody. But others would totally disagree.</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone is disagreeing, at least in this discussion.</p>