CHAPTER 15
Jobs for the Future
Adapting European Vocational Education Models for American Youth
Nancy Hoffman
The best European vocational education systems have a set of characteristics that, taken together, are not matched anywhere in the United States. The systems have special youth policies; they see the younger generations as important to support, protect, and engage with as an investment in future prosperity. And in partnership with employers and unions, they educate 40% to 75% of their young people in vocational education and training (VET) systems that link education and labor market needs and include substantial learning in the workplace.
The following key factors make a VET system strong:
• The system is formed through public/private partnerships with the state, local education authorities, schools, employers, and labor unions.
• Employers have a major role, usually codified in a legal framework, in defining the qualifications required for clusters of occupations in their sectors of the economy.
• With support from organizations representing their occupational sector, employers take responsibility for building the curriculum and developing and carrying out assessments.
• With employer participation, a government education agency, usually at the national level, is responsible for standardization of the system and for quality control and improvement.
With this system in place, employers open their enterprises to young people, usually starting at around age 16.
Among European systems, the most familiar to Americans are what are called “dual” or “apprenticeship” systems, the classic structure in which students spend 3 days a week at work or in a training organization and 2 days in school. (“Dual” refers to learning at school and at a workplace.) In such systems, the workplace, not the school, is the center of the students’ learning environment. They progress from full-time school through about age 15, to a mix of work and school in the vocational system in the course of attaining a qualification through about age 19, to full-time work in the labor market. These “alternance” arrangements generally last 3 to 4 years as the young person attains skills, knowledge, competencies, and, in some cases, training as a manager in the chosen field. In a number of systems, a vocational qualification also makes a student eligible to enter a technical higher education institution or, with some extra preparation, a university.
The Need for Multiple Postsecondary Routes
There is much to admire in these systems. In 2011, the Harvard Graduate School of Education released Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the 21st Century.1 The report argued that our current education system was too narrowly focused on the goal of preparing all young people to pursue a 4-year college or university degree, whereas other postsecondary routes to careers might far better suit significant numbers of students.
As only one young person in three obtained a 4-year degree by age 25, and roughly 30% of the job openings projected over the next decade required some education beyond high school but not necessarily a 4-year degree, the report’s authors called for much more attention to building career pathways in high-growth, high-demand occupational fields that spanned high school and community or technical college preparation and could provide young people with skills and credentials valued in the labor market. The vision the report laid out was influenced in specific ways by the best European VET systems. This chapter briefly explores elements of the European VET systems that might be adapted for the United States, as well as those are too incongruous with U.S. education policy to be workable here. But first an update on the response to the Pathways report.
Given the high costs of college, and the attention given to the mismatch between the skills employers seek and those that job applicants have, the report struck a cord with policymakers and with those who are concerned about the future of young people. Consequently, in 2012 the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Jobs for the Future, a Boston-based nonprofit group focused on creating educational and economic opportunity for low-income youths and adults, decided to invite eight states—California, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York, Ohio, and Tennessee—to join them in creating the Pathways to Prosperity Network.
The Pathways to Prosperity Network
The Pathways to Prosperity Network creates career pathways for students in what is known as grades 9 to 14 (discussed below). Two more states, Arizona and Delaware, joined the network in June 2014.
We are attempting to build a stronger career education system in the United States, one that is more responsive to the needs of the labor market. Along with the states in the Pathways Network, the federal government, some philanthropies and corporate foundations, and nonprofit organizations and states beyond the network are engaged in this work. In fact, it may not be premature to say that a movement is in the making to rethink the role of career preparation in the high school curriculum. (For an update on the work thus far, see “The Pathways to Prosperity State Network: A Progress Report, 2012–2014.”2)
But, most readers would say, the United States has career and technical education (CTE) in every state. Doesn’t the Perkins Act support it, and don’t states put their own dollars into high school and postsecondary programs to prepare young people for careers? Don’t we have vocational schools and programs? The answer, is “Yes, but. . . .” Most CTE programs have the following shortcomings: For most of its history, CTE was seen as the option for weaker students who either did not want, or did not have the preparation, to go on to postsecondary education, rather than as an opportunity for a wide range of students to choose an applied learning approach. For this reason, the reputation of vocational education suffered.
In addition, vocational education became a target of the civil rights community because many students of color and low-income students were tracked into vocational schools and programs. The message to these students from counselors and teachers was, “You’re not college material,” which removed students’ freedom to choose to attend a 2- or 4-year college.
Finally, the data showing that the United States has middling achievement results for 15-year-olds in the international comparison known as PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment3) have served to focus education policymakers, teachers, and school leaders on raising academic achievement levels to the exclusion of career preparation. Thus, many comprehensive high schools ended their career preparation curriculum and stopped integrating CTE and academics. Ironically, by focusing so heavily on mathematics and literacy to the neglect of their application in the real world of careers, educators have failed to demonstrate to the majority of students the utility of what they are learning in school.
The Pathways to Prosperity Network is organized around a simple framework, the foundation of which is a grades 9 to 14 career pathway—a career academy or comprehensive program of study that spans high school and 2 years of community college and includes all requirements for completion of a high school diploma and a post-secondary credential with currency in the regional labor market. Other levers in the framework include the following:
• Career Guidance: an early and sustained career-information and advising system to help students and families make informed choices about educational career paths
• Employer Engagement: employers committed to providing learning opportunities at the workplace and supporting the transition of young people into the labor market
• Intermediaries: local or regional intermediary organizations to provide the infrastructure, coordination, and support for the development of such pathways
• State Leadership and Policy: to support, scale, and sustain career pathways
Behind these levers and in the approach we are taking to implementation are lessons adapted from European vocational education. The attitude toward European vocational education adopted in the Pathways Network is best expressed by a thoughtfully worded few sentences from Henry Levin of Teachers College, Columbia University: “Careful comparative work raises new possibilities for any country to think about and also allows us to see our own taken-for-granted practices with new eyes. It tells us that there are other ways to get to a goal and broadens our thinking about what these might be.” Nonetheless, at every turn, when we note that VET works well abroad, and that the United States would do well to consider it, we have had to counter the standard U.S. responses to the program: “They track 12-year-olds,” and “U.S. employers would never engage in such a program.” The first of these statements was true a decade ago, but not today. The second is the major challenge of the Pathways Network.
The most persuasive arguments that VET “works” outside of the United States is in the finding that VET produces very high rates of upper secondary completion (schooling to around age 19), and that almost all participants make smooth transitions into the labor market after completing upper secondary school. Countries with strong VET systems have upper secondary completion rates that top 90%.4 (Upper secondary is actually a benchmark closer to the completion of a high school diploma and a career certification or a CTE degree from a community college.) The rate of U.S. high school completion—a lesser standard—is about 80%, depending on how and over what length of time statistics are compiled. Serving the majority of 16- to 19-year-olds, VET also results in very low youth unemployment rates—below 10% in strong VET countries, and even below 5% in Switzerland and the Netherlands.5 These low rates rose only slightly during the economic crisis of 2008, while in the United States teens face the most challenging labor market since World War II, with youth unemployment hovering around 20%. It is the lowest income teens who have the greatest difficulty in attaining strong career education, opportunities for internships and apprenticeships, and access to well-paying jobs with career ladders.
Adapting Aspects of the European System
The Pathways design has been influenced by and has attempted to adapt for the United States such aspects of the European system as governance, credentialing, work experience for young people, intermediaries, and employer engagement. In part, we cannot aspire to do what strong European VET systems do because the United States is, at the same time, both one country and 50 separate states that have considerable leeway because of the weak federal role in education. We can, however, work in individual states to adapt the laws, regulations, and ways of doing business to better serve the needs of young people. But today, while some states are making progress, there isn’t a state in the union that has the makings of a scaled dual system, and one is not likely to emerge. A model of career education that utilizes some elements of the dual system but that is suited to the United States is very much a work in progress.
The key aspects of the strong European VET systems that are least likely to be adapted in the United States are the multipartite governance systems that encode in legal agreements among governments, employers, unions, and other social partners the joint responsibilities required to educate young people for careers and civic life, and the systems of standardized qualifications that specify the competencies (skills, knowledge, and behaviors) that are required for almost all occupations.
In regard to governance arrangements, VET systems have legal cooperative agreements that spell out the roles and responsibilities for each partner, including how the curriculum is designed, how assessments are carried out, how various aspects of the system are funded, what the requirements are for training vocational teachers and trainers (those who work inside companies), and, very important, what mechanisms exist for keeping up with labor market trends so as to manage apprenticeship openings and opportunities. Under these legal arrangements, a critical role of the public sector is to ensure that the education provided is broad enough to produce well-rounded citizens and workers who can move between companies and roles within broadly defined occupations. While the United States has many public–private partnerships that address specific workforce needs and serve in advisory capacities, such as workforce investment boards, P-16 (preschool through college) councils, chambers of commerce, and nonprofits, they are not formally engaged in designing and running the education and training system.
Qualifications are a different matter. The international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), based in Paris, defines a qualification system as “all aspects of a country’s activity resulting in the recognition of learning.” Most European countries and the European Union itself proceed under the assumption that almost all occupations are regulated, and that the key knowledge, skills, and competencies required to attain a specific qualification are codified. Qualifications are multidimensional, marrying systematic and contingent knowledge about a broad field of endeavor with the social and personal qualities that are entailed in performing a specific occupation. Depending on the country, qualifications vary in specificity and emphasis, covering a spectrum from specific skills, to work processes, to habits of mind suited to an occupation. For example, attitudes are an official element in the Netherlands’ qualifications systems, while Australian qualifications are more focused on the content of a work role as broken down into component parts.
In countries with qualifications systems, students know from the outset that if they attain a qualification for doing web design or early childhood education or landscaping, potential employers know exactly what learning experiences they bring to the job. For example, in the Netherlands, 700 occupations have standardized qualifications. In France, there is no standardized qualification for becoming a music therapist, so the occupation does not exist. Such systems structure the outcomes of vocational education and are also the underpinnings of countries’ policies to promote a lifelong learning credential for those learning “anytime/anywhere.” The European Union is harmonizing member country vocational qualification systems under a framework that will make credentials more easily transferable within the Union, and will align vocational qualifications with those of “academic” higher education in accordance with the Bologna Process, the work accomplished over the last several years to make divergent systems of higher education comparable.
Anyone familiar with the dizzying array of certificates, certifications, licenses, and other kinds of credentials awarded in the United States will know that even among occupations that do have standardized credentials, in many cases, chaos reigns. Some credentials are transferable, portable, and highly respected, while others mean almost nothing except to the holder and perhaps to the institution that got paid for awarding it. And while standardized credentials exist in fields such as information technology (e.g., Cisco and Comp-TIA [Computing Technology Industry Association] certifications), nursing, and dental hygiene (licensure), some states regulate hair braiding and nail polishing while others leave credentialing to private groups, and large swaths of the economy in most states have no qualifications other than those an employer lists in a job vacancy posting. While there are organizations working to simplify and extend the credentialing system, this is not a task Pathways can handle.
So what is Pathways able to adapt? There are two key characteristics of European VET systems that deeply influence our work—the provision of a mix of school and work for 16- to 19-year-olds that initiates them into the adult world and challenges them to take on real-world responsibilities; and the support for intermediary organizations to link employers and educational institutions.
The Netherlands, for example, offers young people the choice between two attractive VET options—school-based and company-based—that both provide substantial work-based learning (up to 60% in school-based programs and 80% in an apprenticeship). VET schools, which resemble community colleges in size and atmosphere, host their own enterprises, and young people can be seen in these institutions carrying out normal functions of the enterprises in which they have selected to train. Apprentices’ wages are negotiated in collective agreements and are at least equivalent to the minimum wage, so that young people are essentially recompensed during their later teenage years.
A second attractive characteristic of the Dutch VET is that programs have varying lengths, with a popular vocational training option taking 4 years. This pathway prepares young people for middle management positions in their specific occupation or career area. The predominant company-based programs train in technology fields, while VET schools have a wider variety of options. Both approaches come under the same administrative framework, and, in both cases, schools are responsible for linking the curriculum with practical training in workplaces. Those with qualifications obtained via the dual pathway find work sooner because they have more practical experience and because most already have jobs since they generally stay on in their host companies.6
Seeing young people at work in a variety of settings—factories, banks, insurance agencies, automotive shops, and bakeries—convinced the Pathways framework designers that choosing a first career area at age 15 is a positive step, not a limiting one. Trainers and teachers in Europe have the attitude that people change careers, of course, and that once a plumber or a web designer does not mean always a plumber or a web designer. The goal is to give each young person enough work experience to launch them into productive adulthood, to open the door to post-secondary education, and to ensure that they become lifelong learners. Given the dearth of opportunities youths have in the United States today to get any work experience at all, and the great toll this takes on our lowest income youths, we are convinced that schools and employers must work together to provide employment opportunities, and that early career advising is an urgent need in most school systems. In Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and several of the Nordic countries, VET is the main supplier of well-trained workers for the labor market. Called the “foundation” or “backbone” of the economy and society, vocational training is provided in the Netherlands for about 40% of all workers at least through the upper secondary level, and currently about 68% of young people choose vocational education over the academic route.7 One can hardly call this a tracking system when it is the mainstream choice that offers an array of post-VET options for attaining further degrees and credentials; students compete for sought-after placements. While VET still does not have the status and prestige of the academic pathway to university in even the highest performing systems, one comes away from visiting VET schools and workplaces convinced that we are asking far too little of many teenagers who would thrive and produce if given adult work responsibilities, adult guidance, and a paycheck.
The Role of Intermediary Organizations
Intermediary organizations are a much more complicated matter. They are the hidden engines of European VET systems. Whether organized by sector association (construction, communications, commercial banking, transportation, social services) or by region, intermediaries work between educational institutions and employers to make it possible for employers to induct young people into the world of work and to ensure that training is sufficiently broad. Supported by a mix of public and private funds, intermediaries represent employer groups in creating qualifications, assessments, and curricula in partnership with education authorities. Many carry out aspects of training, such as providing orientation for apprentices or running short courses of interest to multiple employers in a sector. In some systems, they may execute contracts with trainees or apprentices and even hire them and send them out to companies. Such organizations are also part of a tiered governance or steering system sending representatives of their sector to sit on national skills councils or to negotiate with labor unions.
The Pathways framework requires the establishment of intermediary organizations to link employers and educational institutions with the primary purpose of aggregating and making available work experience opportunities for students. Intermediaries are needed in a variety of forms, since schools and community colleges cannot be expected to aggregate work-based learning experiences at the scale needed, nor can single employers, especially small and medium-sized companies, do the legwork and provide the training needed to set up productive internships and apprenticeships. And while schools and community colleges generally embrace and call for more work-based learning opportunities for their students, little information is available about the employer supply side of work-based learning opportunities. Intermediaries can collect such data and provide the match between supply and demand. Among the regions in the eight states in the current Pathways State Network, several are developing intermediaries building on the model used at the Boston Private Industry Council (PIC), which for over three decades has been connecting young people with employers in large numbers. The City of Boston places around 9,000 young people in summer jobs, with the PIC handling all the private employer placements. But such organizations are rare in the United States. The PIC is a workforce investment board, but chambers of commerce, community foundations, and new built-for-purpose organizations are performing intermediary functions, and interest in these organizations is growing.
Finally, while the Pathways work can move forward in states lacking a qualifications system and tripartite governance, the value proposition and design of the Pathways to Prosperity Network rest on engaging employers in taking young people into their workplaces in substantive and sustainable ways. This is the sine qua non of the Pathways design, and the jury is out about whether private companies in the United States along with public and nonprofit employers can be convinced that commitment to creating a youth talent pipeline is in their best interest and critical to mending the fraying social fabric in the United States today. At this writing, we can name a few bright spots on the horizon, but nothing that would convince us that employers are yet willing to engage in partnerships like those between European companies and the education ministries. Too many regions lack the intermediary organizations that play an important role in engaging employers.
Bright Spots in the United States
Among the bright spots are career academies, early college high schools that integrate career credentials, and modernized vocational schools. Many of these have business partners and advisors who provide some work-based learning, but nothing of the scale or as systemic as the European VET. In 2012, IBM took the initiative to establish Pathways in Technology Early College High School, a grades 9 to 14 school set up in partnership with the City University of New York and the New York City Department of Education. Similar models sponsored by companies or with substantial employer engagement are springing up in other settings. SAP, the German business solutions company, is opening several schools, as are other companies in New York City. New York State has funded 16 regions to adapt the pathways in technology (PTECH) model. And both the U.S. Department of Labor and the State of California have made substantial investments ($100 million for Youth Career Connect and $500 million for California Pathways Trust, respectively) to build regional career pathways.
Also promising is the growing visibility in the United States of European companies seeking workers for their enterprises in the United States. Since a good number come from countries with strong VET systems to set up production in the United States, they search for and are surprised not to find the pipeline of well-trained workers familiar to them from their home countries. Thus, a number of these companies are working with community colleges to adapt apprenticeship models suited to the United States. Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin all have growing youth apprenticeship opportunities, and other states have long had small-scale programs as well. Finally, if there is any silver lining to the fiscal crisis that has brought hardship to so many American families, it is that a much wider segment of the population now understands the need to promote technical skills development among youths, and with that, the opportunity for applied learning. Hence, we are hopeful that new models will emerge and that some of the stigma of vocational education will evaporate as young people graduate from 21st century pathways with work experience and a smooth transition into the labor market.
Conclusion
The Pathways to Prosperity State Network is influenced by the following factors:
• The clarity of choices for 15-year-olds: either the applied or the theoretical pathway or what the United States would call either CTE or academic high school
• The salutary impact of providing teenagers with a mix of school and work
• The absolute requirement that CTE or VET systems cannot be successful without strong intermediaries to link employers and education institutions
• The necessity for employers to build a “talent pipeline” of young professionals (as apprentices are called in Switzerland)
While many educators still believe that European systems track 12- to 14-year-olds into jobs from which they cannot escape, the reality is far different. First, in a number of countries, VET is the option for the majority. Second, and very important, good systems keep skills development broad enough so that students don’t end up “owned” by the enterprise that trains them. Third, employers are deeply proud of the young people they train, and are pleased with their contributions. And most important, in the best systems, what we see is that 16- to 19-year-olds flourish and mature in vocational education with the support of teachers, trainers, and their company coworkers.
Notes
1. Symonds, W., Schwartz, R. & Ferguson, R. (2011). Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the 21st Century. Cambridge: Harvard Graduate School of Education.
2. http://www.jff.org/publications/pathways-prosperity-network-state-progress-report-2012-2014.
3. PISA results, 2012. http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_1.asp.
4. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2013). Education at a Glance. http://www.oecd.org/edu/eag2013%20(eng)--FINAL%2020%20June%202013.pdf; and OECD. (2010). Learning for Jobs and Jobs for Youth. Paris: OECD Publishing. See also Bishop, J. (2010). “Which Secondary Education Systems Work Best? The United States or Northern Europe” Working papers 2010, paper 105. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/workingpapers/105.
5. http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/employment/youth-unemployment-rate_20752342-table2. Each country compiles its data differently, and the OECD data have a large margin of error. For April 2014, see La Situation sur la Marche du Travail, Department Federale de L’Economie, de la Formation, et de la Recherché, SECO, which shows youth unemployment in the 3% range. http://www.news.admin.ch/NSBSubscriber/message/attachments/35156.pdf.
6. See Apprenticeship supply in the Member States of the European Union, 2012.
7. See Overview of the Dutch vocational education and training system, Country Report 8, 2012, CEDEFOP, REFERNET, Netherlands. http://voieproeurope.onisep.fr/en/initial-vocational-education-and-training-in-europe/dutch-system/ and http://www.government.nl/issues/education/secondary-vocational-education-mbo.