成人VR视频

The UK has lessons to learn from Germany

Emulating Germany’s funding model would not be easy, but English critics tend to overlook its strengths, says Howard Hotson

九月 10, 2015
Marcus Butt illustration (10 September 2015)
Source: Marcus Butt

“Germany doesn’t provide the answer for opponents of fees that people sometimes think it does,” noted Nick Hillman, director of the 成人VR视频 Policy Institute, in last week’s 成人VR视频. “People always imply that other countries have off-the-shelf solutions”, but such thinking “always becomes a bit simplistic” (“Germany’s abolition of fees ‘cannot be model for UK’?”, 3 September).

Hang on a second. Who said emulating the German funding model would be easy? My own contribution to this debate, (“U-turn of the century”, 13 February 2014), argued the opposite point: namely, that the German public’s capacity to overthrow tuition fees derived from a centuries-old, decentralised system of higher education radically different from England’s centrist one. Sadly, the May election result confirmed this prognosis.

But Hillman goes further, arguing that emulating Germany is not merely difficult but undesirable. Why? Because Germany educates a smaller proportion of its young people at university than the UK does. Here, 48 per cent of 25- to 34-year-olds have a tertiary qualification. There, the figure is just 27 per cent.

These are striking statistics; but what do they mean? Hillman’s interpretation is based on two assumptions, copied uncritically from policymakers such as his former boss, David Willetts. One is that bigger is necessarily better. The other is that public finances cannot fund large student numbers. Germany’s system remains woefully small, he concludes, because it is reliant on public money.

But is either assumption sound? Where is the evidence, first of all, that German tertiary education is starved of cash? from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Germany spends a higher proportion of its GDP on tertiary education (1.3 per cent) than the UK (1.2 per cent). Annual spending per student is also higher in Germany ($16,723 (?10,994)) than it is in the UK ($14,223). Moreover, the average student studies for far longer in Germany (4.19 years) than in Britain (2.74 years). This is partly because almost twice the proportion of young Germans complete an advanced degree (2.3 per cent of their age cohort) as their debt-ridden British contemporaries (1.3 per cent). Advanced study is made possible, in turn, partly because German spending on research and development (3.0 per cent of GDP) is also almost twice the UK level (1.7 per cent). All told, cumulative expenditure per student over the average period of study is almost twice as high in Germany ($70,069) as in the UK ($38,971). Are these the finances of a system desperate to expand but starved of the necessary funds?

Hence the need to question the second assumption: might the Germans have cultivated a smaller university system not because they cannot afford to go large, but because they think small is beautiful?

To understand why smaller might be better, we need to understand the different economic context in which the German university system sits. Germany’s economy is driven in large measure by the Mittelstand: small to medium-sized, export-oriented companies, each with pin-sharp focus on doing one specific thing better than any other company on the planet. Such family owned, locally embedded, high-tech firms require a steady supply of highly skilled workers creatively engaged in staying ahead of the competition. In order to guarantee this supply, local employers cooperate with educators, unions and the federal government to design more than 350 national curricula for the . German apprentices divide their time between theoretical study in the classroom and hands-on experience on the job. For both components, they are well remunerated. Remuneration of apprentices plus the cost of delivering these two- to four-year courses costs between $25,000 and $80,000 per apprentice. Thanks to programmes like these, more than 80 per cent of young Germans find employment within six months of completing their education, and youth unemployment is far lower in Germany (7.8 per cent) than in the UK (20.3 per cent).

Is it any wonder that two young people have traditionally preferred this path for every one in university? Even senior educationalists – such as the rector of the University of Siegen quoted in Hepi’s report – wonder aloud whether the growth in university enrolment is a good thing. In short, demand for university places is limited in Germany because its young people enjoy something their British contemporaries can scarcely imagine: more than one route to a lifetime of rewarding, secure, esteemed employment.

So let’s agree: the German system is not an “off-the-shelf model”. Emulating it would require far more than re-engineering the English education system. It would require rebalancing our service-driven economy, correcting the exploitative attitude of management to labour, and eradicating the age-old disdain for manual work that somehow survived Britain’s brief period as the workshop of the world. But when even George Osborne yearns to rebalance the British economy on something like the German model, there is nothing “simplistic” about pointing out the admirable features of its educational component. Hepi should be helping to think through this challenge, not reinforcing the mis-guided assumptions underlying the UK’s deeply flawed social, economic and education policy.

Howard Hotson is professor of early modern intellectual history, University of Oxford.

后记

Print headline: Small is beautiful: the UK has lessons to learn from Germany

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Reader's comments (3)

I couldn't agree more with Howard Hotson's excellent article and his all-too-true conclusions. A British national resident in Germany for the last 36 years, I can confirm that the balanced options of tertiary education alongside dual degree programmes, combining vocational college courses and practical training, serve both young people and society well. Manual labour, enshrined in well-structured apprenticeships backed up by a thorough theoretical grounding in the practices of the trade, is held in high esteem here in Germany, not held in contempt, as is sadly all too often still the case in the UK. Frances Mechan-Schmidt, Germany
"The current situation is financially unsustainable. It is deeply inegalitarian in its allocation of resources. It is also inefficient and bad for the ‘human capital development’, which increasingly drives and justifies education policy. In post-19 education, we are producing vanishingly small numbers of higher technician level qualifications, while massively increasing the output of generalist bachelors degrees and low-level vocational qualifications. We are doing so because of the financial incentives and administrative structures that governments themselves have created, not because of labour market demand, and the imbalance looks set to worsen yet further. We therefore need, as a matter of urgency, to start thinking about post-19 funding and provision in a far more integrated way." Quoting the concluding paragraph from Heading for the precipice: Can further and higher education funding policies be sustained? by Alison Wolf (Baroness Wolf of Dulwich), the Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management at King’s College London, and Director of the International Centre for University Policy Research at King’s. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/policy-institute/publications/Issuesandideas-alison-wolf-digital.pdf Highly recommended.
I suppose that the German nation plan is outstanding but it is their uniqueness and should be limited to them
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