Discouraged and hedged – why students enter VET after obtaining university eligibility

ABSTRACT

Approximately 25% of vocational education and training (VET) applicants in Germany hold a university entrance diploma (Abitur). These students enter VET even though they could enter higher education (HE); the latter typically yields higher incomes and better career prospects. We extend research on the question of why students choose this seemingly less optimal career path by exploring the interplay between local labour-market conditions and social background. We focus on students’ path through (post-)secondary school and combine data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) with regionalised data to analyse students’ (1) aspirations for an Abitur in 9^th grade, (2) chances of obtaining an Abitur (3), aspirations for HE over VET in 12^th grade and (4) the transition to HE versus VET after obtaining an Abitur. Our results speak to the presence of two theoretical concepts: the ‘discouraged worker effect’ and ‘hedging’. In tight local labour markets, students from lower-status families are discouraged from entering VET and continue in general school. Hence, they aspire an Abitur and obtain an Abitur to avoid the VET market at first. Later, they use their Abitur as a hedge to take advantage of this higher educational credential in contested VET markets.

KEYWORDS:

• Discouraged worker effect
• educational aspirations
• hedging
• local labour-market conditions
• transitions to VET

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For a schematic overview of possible school-to-work transition options in Germany, see Figure A1 in the Appendix.

2. Although school-based programmes are not directly associated with the regional labour-markets situation, it is most likely to assume that students’ general perception of VET is equal to the dominant dual training/apprenticeship.

3. doi:10.5157/NEPS:SC4:12.0.0. From 2008 to 2013, NEPS data were collected as part of the Framework Programme for the Promotion of Empirical Educational Research funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). As of 2014, the NEPS survey is carried out by the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) at the University of Bamberg, in cooperation with a nationwide network (Blossfeld et al. 2011).

4. As students in special education face systematically different challenges in their school-to-work transitions, they are excluded from the analyses for reasons of leaking comparability.

5. While idealistic aspirations refer to the educational outcomes individuals hope to have, realistic aspirations refer to educational outcomes they actually expect to have, which means that, in the latter case, possible restrictions are considered. In the latter case, the evaluation of the context conditions can be considered as largely completed (Haller 1968).

6. To avoid reductions in sample sizes, we did not exclude cases with previously missing aspirations when investigating actual transitions. The results based on the balanced samples are presented in the Appendix Table A1, to ensure that there is no bias due to this.

7. The LAU is the complementation to the NUTS (nomenclature des unités territoriales statistiques) system of standard reference for regional units in the European Union. In Germany, the LAU refers to municipalities (‘Gemeinde’) (cf., Eurostat 2018). NEPS uses 11,193 municipality codes that existed in 2013 for the contextual data merging.

8. The impacts of the explanatory variables become insignificant because of the low variance in the dependent variable, due to the strong value concentration at the higher end of the scale.

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted as part of the junior research group RISA, based at the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB).