Public-private partnerships for skill development in the United States, Russia, and China

ABSTRACT

We compare three countries where public policy has explicitly sought to align incentives of employers and educational institutions around closing the gap between skill formation and labor market demand. In large, heterogeneous countries such as the United States, Russia and China, collaborative arrangements such apprenticeships and other forms of public-private partnerships can be constructed at the subnational level by building on direct, face-to-face ties across educational, business, government, and civic sectors. Drawing on existing literature as well as fieldwork studying a number of specific cases in the three countries, the paper develops a typology of such arrangements and proposes an explanation for the observed variation. It emphasizes the importance of two sets of factors: those that induce cooperation on the part of firms and schools, and those that influence the character of such partnerships.

KEYWORDS:

• Technical and vocational education (TVET)
• public-private partnerships
• labor market
• Russia
• China
• United States

Notes

1. In the late 1950s, Kenneth Arrow argued that the supply for skill will tend to lag behind the supply of it, both because of the time it takes information about labor shortages and surpluses to diffuse through the society and the slow adaptation by educational institutions to changed demand (Arrow and Capron 1959).

2. http://www.moe.gov.cn/s78/A02/zfs__left/s5911/moe_619/tnull_1312.html.

3. Ibid., p. 22.

4. “National Medium and Long Term Education Reform and Development Plan (2010-2020)” http://www.gov.cn/jrzg/2010-07/29/content_1667143.htm; “Decision on the Acceleration of Modern Vocational Training” http://tvet.ac.nz/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Decisn-of-the-State-Council2014_booklet.pdf.

5. http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/2014-06/22/content_8901.htm.

6. http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/2017-12/19/content_5248564.htm.

7. http://www.moe.edu.cn/srcsite/A07/s7055/201802/t20180214_327467.html.

8. http://www.chinazy.org/models/adefault/news_detail.aspx?artid=68037&cateid=1471.

9. This was in remarks to the All-Russian Popular Front as part of Putin’s election campaign in 2012 (http://www.newsru.com/finance/29feb2012/pusuppose.html).

10. President’s address to the Federal Assembly, 1 December 2016 (http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/53379).

11. President’s address to the Federal Assembly, 12 December 2013

(https://rg.ru/2013/12/12/poslanie.html).

12. http://asi.ru/staffing/dualeducation/.

13. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/trump-administration-equipping-american-students-workers-skills-need-succeed/.

14. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/us/politics/trump-worker-training.html.

15. https://doleta.gov/oa/data_statistics.cfm.

16. This summary is based on collaborative research with Richard Doner, Michael Rich, and Crawford Schneider.

17. Some of the information on which this summary is based is drawn from interviews with school officials on 28 November 2018.

18. http://wsww.jff.org/initiatives/pathways-prosperity-network/new-york.

19. Based on interviews with Volkswagen representatives, government officials, and experts in Chattanooga, Kaluga, Changchun, Beijing, and Wolfsburg.

20. Information from presentation by Ashley Carter, Chief Strategy Office of Careerwise Colorado, at the Fall 2017 Pathways to Prosperity Network Institute, Cambridge, MA, 24–25 October 2017.

21. For example, the state government of South Carolina provides a tax exemption to every employer who hires an apprentice. As a result, the number of apprenticeships in the state has expanded rapidly (http://www.apprenticeshipcarolina.com/).

22. For more information about the Russian case, see Remington (2017) and Remington and Marques (2020).

23. The Torch program in China is a national effort to use technology development zones to encourage local industrial innovation, which can then be diffused nationally. It has been in existence for 30 years. Overseen by the Ministry of Science and Technology, it is an example of what Sebastian Heilmann calls “experimentation under the shadow of hierarchy” (Heilmann, Shih, and Hofem 2013).

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted with the support of a grant from the Russian Science Foundation, Project No. 16-18-10425, “Public-Private Partnerships in Vocational Education: Firm Level Evidence from Russia and China.” It forms part of a larger project conducted jointly with Israel Marques and Andrei Yakovlev of the Higher School of Economics. This research also received support from a grant from The National Social Science Fund of China, Grant No. 17BGL253, “Skill Formation and Regional Coordinated Innovation during Industry Upgrading.”