Learning Across the Life Course
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Learning Across the Life Course
JUTTA ALLMENDINGER and MARCEL HELBIG
Abstract
Owing to intense changes in educational demands in a globalized world and
demographic shifts in almost all developed countries, structures and content of
educational and vocational training have to adapt. Specificity refers to the need for
a broad-based education, allowing people to train for more than one occupation.
In terms of content, social skills must be taught to embrace diversity. Educational
institutions need to be open for all stages in the life course. Moreover, possibilities
of disconnecting time and space owing to progress in educational media need to be
explored.
These global challenges for the educational system also place demands on education
research. We need to overcome the segmentation in disciplines and narrowly defined
life stages. We need to reconsider the trend toward a standardized system of educational and vocational training. One size does not fit all. Finally, emerging group
differences in educational outcomes have to be more thoroughly explored.
INTRODUCTION
The term education has traditionally been associated with learning and teaching in the first two decades of our lives. According to that view, it is during
those early years that we build the foundation for everything that is to follow:
four to five decades of employment, lifelong integration into society, taking
care of our health, raising children, and active citizenship.
In the face of demographic change and the evolution of a globalized
knowledge economy, this conceptual approach falls short of what is needed
today. Let us begin by looking at demographic change. Each of its three
components—death rates, birth rates, and immigration—poses unique
challenges to education and the educational system. Declining death rates
and higher life expectancy accompanied by good health mean that, proportionally, we invest less and less of our time in education. Our grandparents
spent a higher proportion of their lives on education and training than our
children will. As a result of sharply declining birth rates in many countries,
most people need less time for raising their children and thus have more
time available for work. While this has always been the case for men, it is
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
now equally true of women. This trend is reinforced by women’s higher
levels of education and the need for them to take charge of their own lives
financially. Likewise, both men and women need new competencies to be
able to care for their aging parents and grandparents. Immigration, too,
poses new challenges to education. Up to this point, it has only been in a
small number of countries that people have actively taught and learned at
school how to live with wide-ranging ethnic diversity and a multiplicity of
religions and cultures. For the most part, these competencies are either taken
for granted or addressed much later in life by means of “diversity training”
programs at the workplace, for example.
Demographic development alone has at least four consequences for
education. Specificity. We need a more broad-based education in early
childhood. We need an education that can progressively be built upon on
an ongoing basis, allowing people to train for more than one occupation.
Content. We need different education contents. At the moment, curricula are
being increasingly stripped down to teaching hard cognitive skills. We need
to teach social skills for embracing diversity, the mounting challenges of
giving care to the elderly, and for new gender roles resulting from women’s
increasing and better participation in the work force. Learning contents also
need to be adapted with regard to the local, national, and global dimensions
of education. Maintaining the right balance here is not an easy task to
accomplish. Institutions. We also need to open our educational institutions
to accommodate a second and a third phase of education and training.
One training phase at the beginning of life is no longer enough to sustain a
prolonged work life. Media. Finally, many changes result from the fact that
in the future we will be less likely to learn together and at a fixed location.
In the years ahead, we will see an increase of learning in virtual space,
independent of time and actual space. This trend calls for an active, not a
reactive, approach and a great deal of research.
The need for such sustainable education is underscored by changes going
on in the world of work. Workplace requirements are changing much more
rapidly now than they did a few decades ago. In the future, changes will be
even more fast-paced. Education and training have to respond to that trend.
Likewise, we are witnessing a disconnection of time and space in this context
as well. An ever larger share of work is no longer being completed at a fixed
workplace and during fixed work hours. This trend, too, calls for educational
content more geared toward empowering people to take control of their lives
in a disciplined way than it is today. The idea of a self-entrepreneurial work
force is accurate, and educational institutions need to prepare their students
for embracing it. Ultimately, however, what these new work contents also
mean is that we need a higher overall level of basic education for everybody. In a lot of countries, technology is now so advanced that many tasks
Learning Across the Life Course
3
can be performed by robots—without breaks and at a much lower cost. The
work that remains to be performed by humans will thus be knowledge-based
work, defined precisely by what robots cannot do.
Let us turn from these global challenges for the educational system toward
the more specific demands placed on education research. Here, we see
four major areas of action. The diversification of education research into
ever more disciplines and disciplinary knowledge bases has to be reduced.
The segmentation of education research into studies of ever shorter life and
education spans has to be reduced in favor of studies that look at long-term
educational trajectories. The standardization of educational outcomes needs
to be questioned. Why, and to what extent, should we strive to establish the
same educational goals throughout the world, given the many unintended
secondary effects brought on by that approach? Finally, we need a new
take on group differences in educational outcomes. Why is it that some
groups keep improving their educational outcomes whereas others keep
falling behind, thus widening the gap between the groups? To address these
developments, we need a stronger focus on individualization in education
research and pedagogy.
THE DIVERSIFICATION OF EDUCATION RESEARCH
In recent decades, empirical education research has experienced a major
boom. Initial studies of purely cross-sectional social statistics were followed
by retrospectively collected life course data that allowed for determining the
short, medium, and long-term impact of educational credentials on a wide
range of other life domains. Later, panel data were added, which in many
countries now focus on educational trajectories. Increasingly, these data are
then linked to process-produced administrative data, enabling us to study
educational trajectories, health trajectories, labor market movements, and
family formation processes in conjunction.
The indicators of education research have evolved, too. While researchers
previously looked “only” at the duration of education and training or at the
credential obtained, cognitive competencies in reading, mathematics, and
science have recently made a breakthrough beginning with the 2000 PISA
study, if not earlier. Measures for social and emotional competencies are currently being developed and implemented.
On the basis of those major improvements regarding the methodological
foundations and indicator design, education research began to diversify,
resulting in the strengthening of various disciplines. Educational economics,
for example, became an independent line of research in economics. Education took a methodological turn. The life sciences were added, providing
information about the foundations of educationally relevant biological
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
developments. Political science is a more recent newcomer to the field of
education research. Researchers in each of these disciplines pursue their own
research questions. Economists focus on the returns to education, pedagogy
researchers look at classroom interactions, and sociologists are concerned
with social inequality in educational outcomes, whereas psychologists
examine motivational structures, personality traits, and behavioral patterns.
Political scientists enquire into the general conditions that give rise to
changes in the educational system and allow for supplementing welfare
state typologies with educational regimes.
One of the most pressing tasks of the future will be to systematically integrate these diversifying disciplines and their respective methods and tools.
We need more than a multidisciplinary kind of research that merely places
the various disciplines alongside each other. What we need is transdisciplinary research and researchers capable of looking beyond the boundaries
of their own discipline. Only then will we be able to not only see patterns of
educational decisions and educational returns but also to explain the overall conditions responsible for such outcomes. This will require nothing less
than a reform of our doctoral and postdoctoral training curricula, as well as a
reform of our research funding system, which needs to adopt a programmatic
outlook and an evaluation system that goes beyond disciplinary boundaries.
If we manage to connect the disciplines in this manner, we will likely be
able to explain some of the inconsistencies that arise because of the increasing diversity of indicators. For example, we rarely find that the duration
of school attendance or the acquisition of a specific certificate are adequate
expressions of the competencies an individual has achieved. There are countries that award high-level certificates to a vast number of people and seem
to be leading the way in this regard. At the same time, it turns out for many of
these countries that the competencies measured in international comparisons
do not match this high degree of certification at all. In other words, there are
countries that are rich in certificates but poor in competencies, and then there
are countries that are poor in certificates but rich in competencies. We do not
know why this is the case. The rising importance of internationally defined
benchmarks may provide one explanation. In that case, we would be witnessing a kind of certificate inflation as some countries try to raise their percentage of tertiary education graduates by awarding easy-to-obtain certifications.
SEGMENTATION OF EDUCATION RESEARCH
In addition to the diversification of education research into single disciplines, we see an increasing segmentation of education research. The vast
majority of studies now only look at short episodes in people’s educational
trajectories, whereas the complete educational chains are increasingly being
Learning Across the Life Course
5
disregarded. This may well be due to a synchronization of the evaluation
criteria and the assets required for building a reputation and a career in
academia. These assets increasingly consist of peer-reviewed journal articles,
which, taken together, are now cited more frequently than scholarly books.
The shift from monographs to cumulative doctoral theses as a prerequisite
for earning a PhD is among the drivers of this segmentation of research into
limited, small-scale studies. In the future, we will have to rethink this trend.
We need perseverance and courage to look at learning across the entire life
course from an intragenerational and intergenerational perspective. Only
then will a transdisciplinary approach come to fruition.
And only then will we be able to understand whether, and if so how, early
incidents in children’s educational trajectories have an impact on how children learn later in life, what kinds of transitions they make into the labor
market, and how their competencies and qualifications evolve. Moreover, it
is only by looking beyond single educational stages that we will be able to
make full use of the rich potential of the newly collected datasets. We may
find, for example, that health problems later in life can often be traced to
early educational processes. Similar findings can be expected with regard to
the processes of choosing a partner and starting a family.
STANDARDIZATION OF EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES
In addition to the diversification and segmentation of education research, we
see an increasing degree of standardization with respect to educational outcomes. The OECD creates benchmarks and then uses these benchmarks to
produce neat international rankings. Such benchmarks concern the national
percentage of individuals at each level of educational attainment but also
the degree of tertiarization in the education system. Faced with this global
competition, national systems may easily come under pressure. The dual
vocational training systems in Germany, Austria, Denmark, and Switzerland
are a good example of this. Because the benchmarks are aimed at increasing
tertiary enrollment, they challenge even highly successful vocational training
systems without having previously reviewed the specific ways in which tertiary education is organized in each of these countries. One might think that
the systems currently being modified or even phased out are those that fail to
meet nationally defined education needs, but far from it. Restructuring takes
place without prior national review; it is solely based on standardization and
one-size-fits-all benchmarks.
The much called for shift from elite to mass higher education may mean
giving up tried and tested—and often quite rigorous—vocational training
programs below the tertiary level, and may thus lead to many unintended
consequences. Germany’s dual vocational training system provides a case in
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
point. There are plenty of good reasons for keeping this system. First of all,
it combines practical on-the-job training with theoretical instruction at vocational schools. At least as far the practical components are concerned, the
various jobs for which dual training programs exist can quickly be adapted
to new challenges in the labor market, and thus have the necessary degree of
flexibility. The highly standardized curricula of the school-based part of the
training program provide trainees with non-company-specific, transferable
skills that they are free to use with more than just one employer. Furthermore, the transition from dual vocational training to the labor market has
been shown to occur swiftly compared to other vocational training systems.
Finally, it is not rare for trainees to be hired right away by the companies at
which they trained.
Providing more incentives toward a higher degree of tertiarization constitutes a multiple threat to these vocational training programs. In many
disciplines, a bachelor’s degree takes 3 years to complete, meaning that
a university education is now shorter than an apprenticeship in the dual
system. Moreover, individuals with a university degree are usually placed
on a higher level in collectively agreed pay scales than individuals who have
completed a dual vocational training program; likewise, they experience
higher economic returns over the life course. It should also be noted that
university-based programs are not connected, or nowhere near as closely
connected, to company needs and structures as dual vocational training
programs are. The transition from university to the labor market generally
takes longer, and employers often have to take university graduates through
an additional, company-specific trainee stage.
In addition to this tension between tertiarization and dual vocational training structures in some European countries, the envisaged increase in tertiarization could lead to a rising number of less educated or no longer highly
educated persons. This would be the case if the transition from undergraduate to graduate study became a new kind of filter that only permitted a small
number of graduates to pursue a master’s degree. In that case, tertiarization
would involve a higher degree of diversification within the tertiary sector,
and thus a smaller number of persons earning a degree comparable to the
former 5-year Diploma.
INDIVIDUALIZATION OF EDUCATION
Owing to the globalization of our society, children and adults with very different cultural and religious backgrounds are increasingly being taught in
the same classrooms. At the same time, we are witnessing an increase in
social inequality, usually accompanied by an increase in educational inequality. A socially, culturally, and religiously homogenous group of students in
Learning Across the Life Course
7
the classroom is as much a thing of the past as a homogenous workforce. Staff
diversity is becoming an increasingly bigger challenge for many employers,
who more and more often regard it as a positive challenge that they take
active steps to address. The diversity in our classrooms, by contrast, has so
far received comparatively little attention, and has often been approached
with an undertone of criticism. This is especially true of school systems that
continue to track students into different types of schools at an early age and
thus often deprive them of the opportunity to experience and learn diversity.
To unleash the potential of as many people as possible and to empower
them to lead independent lives, we need a pedagogy that is much more
focused on the development of the individual student and, at the same time,
able to engage students with vastly different backgrounds. In other words,
what we need is a pedagogy of diversity.
This seems to be a top priority for a very different reason as well. For years,
we have seen a widening gap between the academic performance of men
and women. While women, on average, used to have lower level secondary
degrees than men until well into the 1970s, they are now far ahead of the men
in this respect. In most industrialized countries, women represent the majority of first-year university students and are much less likely than men to end
up in a state of educational deprivation. This is true with regard to certificates
as well as competencies. In the vast majority of competence areas, including
reading literacy and foreign language skills, women now outperform men by
large margins. The extent of these differences, however, varies significantly
by country and education system. The same may be said about those areas in
which men continue to have an edge over women, especially in mathematics. Even if we do not understand at this point how these differences may be
explained, we do know that they are not a fact of nature. It is also with respect
to gender, therefore, that we need an individualized pedagogy of diversity,
a variety of different instruments, and enough time to unleash the potential
of each and every student.
In sum, education as a lifelong process is a challenge that needs to be
addressed in a transdisciplinary manner and by looking beyond single
educational stages. Only then will we be able to counter the Matthew effect
so prevalent in education, and especially in the area of adult education. At
the moment, we are still seeing low levels of overall participation in adult
education, and its main beneficiaries are those that already have a good
level of education and training. As a consequence, the existing inequality of
educational outcomes, which has its main roots in social origin, is reinforced.
Adult and continuing education has to encompass all education systems at
the same time. Policies that put too much emphasis on tertiarization ignore
the challenges as well as the great opportunities provided by dual training
in the classroom and at the workplace.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
FURTHER READING
Ballantine, J. H., & Hammack, F. M. (2009). The Sociology of Education. A Systematic
Analysis (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
Gall, M. D., Gall, J. P., & Borg, W. R. (2006). Educational research: An introduction (8th
ed.). New York, NY: Pearson.
Hanushek, E. A., Machin, S. J., & Woessmann, L. (2011). Handbook of the economics of
education (Vol. 4). Amsterdam: North Holland.
Woolfolk, A. (2012). Educational psychology (12th ed.). New York, NY: Pearson.
JUTTA ALLMENDINGER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
President of the WZB (Social Science Research Center Berlin) and professor
of sociology at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Jutta Allmendinger received her training in sociology and social psychology at the University of Mannheim (MA 1982), the University of Wisconsin
and Harvard University (PhD 1989) and the Free University of Berlin (Habilitation, i.e., second book, in 1993).
Jutta Allmendinger worked at the Center for Educational Sciences at the
University of Wisconsin and at Harvard University (1984–1988). From 1988
to 1991, she was with the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development
in Berlin. From1992 to 2007, she was a full professor of sociology at the
Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich and from 2003 to 2007 the
director of the Institute for Employment Research (Institut für Arbeitsmarktund Berufsforschung der Bundesagentur für Arbeit, IAB) in Nürnberg.
Jutta Allmendinger was a fellow at the Harvard Business School from 1991
to 1992 and at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at
Stanford University from 1996–1997. She was chairperson of the German
Society for Sociology (DGS) from 1999 to 2002. In 2009, she received the
Communicator Award—Science Award of the Donors’ Association, awarded
by the German Research Foundation (DFG) to researchers who have been
exceptionally successful in communicating their scientific findings to the
public.
Jutta Allmendinger is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of
Sciences and Humanities (BBAW), the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina and the high-level economic expert group “Innovation for
Growth” of the European Commission.
MARCEL HELBIG SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Marcel Helbig is a researcher at the president’s project group at WZB (Social
Science Research Center Berlin).
Learning Across the Life Course
9
He received his training in sociology, social science, and Communication
Studies at University of Erfurt (BA 2004) and Humboldt University of Berlin
(MA 2007; Dr. phil. 2012).
Marcel Helbig worked since 2007 at the WZB among others in research
group “Education and Transitions into the Labour Market” and in the project
group “National Educational Panel Study: Vocational Education and Lifelong Learning.”
His main research interests are the gender-specific change in educational
success, educational differences among different social groups, and the influence of educational systems on social inequality.
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-
Learning Across the Life Course
JUTTA ALLMENDINGER and MARCEL HELBIG
Abstract
Owing to intense changes in educational demands in a globalized world and
demographic shifts in almost all developed countries, structures and content of
educational and vocational training have to adapt. Specificity refers to the need for
a broad-based education, allowing people to train for more than one occupation.
In terms of content, social skills must be taught to embrace diversity. Educational
institutions need to be open for all stages in the life course. Moreover, possibilities
of disconnecting time and space owing to progress in educational media need to be
explored.
These global challenges for the educational system also place demands on education
research. We need to overcome the segmentation in disciplines and narrowly defined
life stages. We need to reconsider the trend toward a standardized system of educational and vocational training. One size does not fit all. Finally, emerging group
differences in educational outcomes have to be more thoroughly explored.
INTRODUCTION
The term education has traditionally been associated with learning and teaching in the first two decades of our lives. According to that view, it is during
those early years that we build the foundation for everything that is to follow:
four to five decades of employment, lifelong integration into society, taking
care of our health, raising children, and active citizenship.
In the face of demographic change and the evolution of a globalized
knowledge economy, this conceptual approach falls short of what is needed
today. Let us begin by looking at demographic change. Each of its three
components—death rates, birth rates, and immigration—poses unique
challenges to education and the educational system. Declining death rates
and higher life expectancy accompanied by good health mean that, proportionally, we invest less and less of our time in education. Our grandparents
spent a higher proportion of their lives on education and training than our
children will. As a result of sharply declining birth rates in many countries,
most people need less time for raising their children and thus have more
time available for work. While this has always been the case for men, it is
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
now equally true of women. This trend is reinforced by women’s higher
levels of education and the need for them to take charge of their own lives
financially. Likewise, both men and women need new competencies to be
able to care for their aging parents and grandparents. Immigration, too,
poses new challenges to education. Up to this point, it has only been in a
small number of countries that people have actively taught and learned at
school how to live with wide-ranging ethnic diversity and a multiplicity of
religions and cultures. For the most part, these competencies are either taken
for granted or addressed much later in life by means of “diversity training”
programs at the workplace, for example.
Demographic development alone has at least four consequences for
education. Specificity. We need a more broad-based education in early
childhood. We need an education that can progressively be built upon on
an ongoing basis, allowing people to train for more than one occupation.
Content. We need different education contents. At the moment, curricula are
being increasingly stripped down to teaching hard cognitive skills. We need
to teach social skills for embracing diversity, the mounting challenges of
giving care to the elderly, and for new gender roles resulting from women’s
increasing and better participation in the work force. Learning contents also
need to be adapted with regard to the local, national, and global dimensions
of education. Maintaining the right balance here is not an easy task to
accomplish. Institutions. We also need to open our educational institutions
to accommodate a second and a third phase of education and training.
One training phase at the beginning of life is no longer enough to sustain a
prolonged work life. Media. Finally, many changes result from the fact that
in the future we will be less likely to learn together and at a fixed location.
In the years ahead, we will see an increase of learning in virtual space,
independent of time and actual space. This trend calls for an active, not a
reactive, approach and a great deal of research.
The need for such sustainable education is underscored by changes going
on in the world of work. Workplace requirements are changing much more
rapidly now than they did a few decades ago. In the future, changes will be
even more fast-paced. Education and training have to respond to that trend.
Likewise, we are witnessing a disconnection of time and space in this context
as well. An ever larger share of work is no longer being completed at a fixed
workplace and during fixed work hours. This trend, too, calls for educational
content more geared toward empowering people to take control of their lives
in a disciplined way than it is today. The idea of a self-entrepreneurial work
force is accurate, and educational institutions need to prepare their students
for embracing it. Ultimately, however, what these new work contents also
mean is that we need a higher overall level of basic education for everybody. In a lot of countries, technology is now so advanced that many tasks
Learning Across the Life Course
3
can be performed by robots—without breaks and at a much lower cost. The
work that remains to be performed by humans will thus be knowledge-based
work, defined precisely by what robots cannot do.
Let us turn from these global challenges for the educational system toward
the more specific demands placed on education research. Here, we see
four major areas of action. The diversification of education research into
ever more disciplines and disciplinary knowledge bases has to be reduced.
The segmentation of education research into studies of ever shorter life and
education spans has to be reduced in favor of studies that look at long-term
educational trajectories. The standardization of educational outcomes needs
to be questioned. Why, and to what extent, should we strive to establish the
same educational goals throughout the world, given the many unintended
secondary effects brought on by that approach? Finally, we need a new
take on group differences in educational outcomes. Why is it that some
groups keep improving their educational outcomes whereas others keep
falling behind, thus widening the gap between the groups? To address these
developments, we need a stronger focus on individualization in education
research and pedagogy.
THE DIVERSIFICATION OF EDUCATION RESEARCH
In recent decades, empirical education research has experienced a major
boom. Initial studies of purely cross-sectional social statistics were followed
by retrospectively collected life course data that allowed for determining the
short, medium, and long-term impact of educational credentials on a wide
range of other life domains. Later, panel data were added, which in many
countries now focus on educational trajectories. Increasingly, these data are
then linked to process-produced administrative data, enabling us to study
educational trajectories, health trajectories, labor market movements, and
family formation processes in conjunction.
The indicators of education research have evolved, too. While researchers
previously looked “only” at the duration of education and training or at the
credential obtained, cognitive competencies in reading, mathematics, and
science have recently made a breakthrough beginning with the 2000 PISA
study, if not earlier. Measures for social and emotional competencies are currently being developed and implemented.
On the basis of those major improvements regarding the methodological
foundations and indicator design, education research began to diversify,
resulting in the strengthening of various disciplines. Educational economics,
for example, became an independent line of research in economics. Education took a methodological turn. The life sciences were added, providing
information about the foundations of educationally relevant biological
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
developments. Political science is a more recent newcomer to the field of
education research. Researchers in each of these disciplines pursue their own
research questions. Economists focus on the returns to education, pedagogy
researchers look at classroom interactions, and sociologists are concerned
with social inequality in educational outcomes, whereas psychologists
examine motivational structures, personality traits, and behavioral patterns.
Political scientists enquire into the general conditions that give rise to
changes in the educational system and allow for supplementing welfare
state typologies with educational regimes.
One of the most pressing tasks of the future will be to systematically integrate these diversifying disciplines and their respective methods and tools.
We need more than a multidisciplinary kind of research that merely places
the various disciplines alongside each other. What we need is transdisciplinary research and researchers capable of looking beyond the boundaries
of their own discipline. Only then will we be able to not only see patterns of
educational decisions and educational returns but also to explain the overall conditions responsible for such outcomes. This will require nothing less
than a reform of our doctoral and postdoctoral training curricula, as well as a
reform of our research funding system, which needs to adopt a programmatic
outlook and an evaluation system that goes beyond disciplinary boundaries.
If we manage to connect the disciplines in this manner, we will likely be
able to explain some of the inconsistencies that arise because of the increasing diversity of indicators. For example, we rarely find that the duration
of school attendance or the acquisition of a specific certificate are adequate
expressions of the competencies an individual has achieved. There are countries that award high-level certificates to a vast number of people and seem
to be leading the way in this regard. At the same time, it turns out for many of
these countries that the competencies measured in international comparisons
do not match this high degree of certification at all. In other words, there are
countries that are rich in certificates but poor in competencies, and then there
are countries that are poor in certificates but rich in competencies. We do not
know why this is the case. The rising importance of internationally defined
benchmarks may provide one explanation. In that case, we would be witnessing a kind of certificate inflation as some countries try to raise their percentage of tertiary education graduates by awarding easy-to-obtain certifications.
SEGMENTATION OF EDUCATION RESEARCH
In addition to the diversification of education research into single disciplines, we see an increasing segmentation of education research. The vast
majority of studies now only look at short episodes in people’s educational
trajectories, whereas the complete educational chains are increasingly being
Learning Across the Life Course
5
disregarded. This may well be due to a synchronization of the evaluation
criteria and the assets required for building a reputation and a career in
academia. These assets increasingly consist of peer-reviewed journal articles,
which, taken together, are now cited more frequently than scholarly books.
The shift from monographs to cumulative doctoral theses as a prerequisite
for earning a PhD is among the drivers of this segmentation of research into
limited, small-scale studies. In the future, we will have to rethink this trend.
We need perseverance and courage to look at learning across the entire life
course from an intragenerational and intergenerational perspective. Only
then will a transdisciplinary approach come to fruition.
And only then will we be able to understand whether, and if so how, early
incidents in children’s educational trajectories have an impact on how children learn later in life, what kinds of transitions they make into the labor
market, and how their competencies and qualifications evolve. Moreover, it
is only by looking beyond single educational stages that we will be able to
make full use of the rich potential of the newly collected datasets. We may
find, for example, that health problems later in life can often be traced to
early educational processes. Similar findings can be expected with regard to
the processes of choosing a partner and starting a family.
STANDARDIZATION OF EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES
In addition to the diversification and segmentation of education research, we
see an increasing degree of standardization with respect to educational outcomes. The OECD creates benchmarks and then uses these benchmarks to
produce neat international rankings. Such benchmarks concern the national
percentage of individuals at each level of educational attainment but also
the degree of tertiarization in the education system. Faced with this global
competition, national systems may easily come under pressure. The dual
vocational training systems in Germany, Austria, Denmark, and Switzerland
are a good example of this. Because the benchmarks are aimed at increasing
tertiary enrollment, they challenge even highly successful vocational training
systems without having previously reviewed the specific ways in which tertiary education is organized in each of these countries. One might think that
the systems currently being modified or even phased out are those that fail to
meet nationally defined education needs, but far from it. Restructuring takes
place without prior national review; it is solely based on standardization and
one-size-fits-all benchmarks.
The much called for shift from elite to mass higher education may mean
giving up tried and tested—and often quite rigorous—vocational training
programs below the tertiary level, and may thus lead to many unintended
consequences. Germany’s dual vocational training system provides a case in
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
point. There are plenty of good reasons for keeping this system. First of all,
it combines practical on-the-job training with theoretical instruction at vocational schools. At least as far the practical components are concerned, the
various jobs for which dual training programs exist can quickly be adapted
to new challenges in the labor market, and thus have the necessary degree of
flexibility. The highly standardized curricula of the school-based part of the
training program provide trainees with non-company-specific, transferable
skills that they are free to use with more than just one employer. Furthermore, the transition from dual vocational training to the labor market has
been shown to occur swiftly compared to other vocational training systems.
Finally, it is not rare for trainees to be hired right away by the companies at
which they trained.
Providing more incentives toward a higher degree of tertiarization constitutes a multiple threat to these vocational training programs. In many
disciplines, a bachelor’s degree takes 3 years to complete, meaning that
a university education is now shorter than an apprenticeship in the dual
system. Moreover, individuals with a university degree are usually placed
on a higher level in collectively agreed pay scales than individuals who have
completed a dual vocational training program; likewise, they experience
higher economic returns over the life course. It should also be noted that
university-based programs are not connected, or nowhere near as closely
connected, to company needs and structures as dual vocational training
programs are. The transition from university to the labor market generally
takes longer, and employers often have to take university graduates through
an additional, company-specific trainee stage.
In addition to this tension between tertiarization and dual vocational training structures in some European countries, the envisaged increase in tertiarization could lead to a rising number of less educated or no longer highly
educated persons. This would be the case if the transition from undergraduate to graduate study became a new kind of filter that only permitted a small
number of graduates to pursue a master’s degree. In that case, tertiarization
would involve a higher degree of diversification within the tertiary sector,
and thus a smaller number of persons earning a degree comparable to the
former 5-year Diploma.
INDIVIDUALIZATION OF EDUCATION
Owing to the globalization of our society, children and adults with very different cultural and religious backgrounds are increasingly being taught in
the same classrooms. At the same time, we are witnessing an increase in
social inequality, usually accompanied by an increase in educational inequality. A socially, culturally, and religiously homogenous group of students in
Learning Across the Life Course
7
the classroom is as much a thing of the past as a homogenous workforce. Staff
diversity is becoming an increasingly bigger challenge for many employers,
who more and more often regard it as a positive challenge that they take
active steps to address. The diversity in our classrooms, by contrast, has so
far received comparatively little attention, and has often been approached
with an undertone of criticism. This is especially true of school systems that
continue to track students into different types of schools at an early age and
thus often deprive them of the opportunity to experience and learn diversity.
To unleash the potential of as many people as possible and to empower
them to lead independent lives, we need a pedagogy that is much more
focused on the development of the individual student and, at the same time,
able to engage students with vastly different backgrounds. In other words,
what we need is a pedagogy of diversity.
This seems to be a top priority for a very different reason as well. For years,
we have seen a widening gap between the academic performance of men
and women. While women, on average, used to have lower level secondary
degrees than men until well into the 1970s, they are now far ahead of the men
in this respect. In most industrialized countries, women represent the majority of first-year university students and are much less likely than men to end
up in a state of educational deprivation. This is true with regard to certificates
as well as competencies. In the vast majority of competence areas, including
reading literacy and foreign language skills, women now outperform men by
large margins. The extent of these differences, however, varies significantly
by country and education system. The same may be said about those areas in
which men continue to have an edge over women, especially in mathematics. Even if we do not understand at this point how these differences may be
explained, we do know that they are not a fact of nature. It is also with respect
to gender, therefore, that we need an individualized pedagogy of diversity,
a variety of different instruments, and enough time to unleash the potential
of each and every student.
In sum, education as a lifelong process is a challenge that needs to be
addressed in a transdisciplinary manner and by looking beyond single
educational stages. Only then will we be able to counter the Matthew effect
so prevalent in education, and especially in the area of adult education. At
the moment, we are still seeing low levels of overall participation in adult
education, and its main beneficiaries are those that already have a good
level of education and training. As a consequence, the existing inequality of
educational outcomes, which has its main roots in social origin, is reinforced.
Adult and continuing education has to encompass all education systems at
the same time. Policies that put too much emphasis on tertiarization ignore
the challenges as well as the great opportunities provided by dual training
in the classroom and at the workplace.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
FURTHER READING
Ballantine, J. H., & Hammack, F. M. (2009). The Sociology of Education. A Systematic
Analysis (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
Gall, M. D., Gall, J. P., & Borg, W. R. (2006). Educational research: An introduction (8th
ed.). New York, NY: Pearson.
Hanushek, E. A., Machin, S. J., & Woessmann, L. (2011). Handbook of the economics of
education (Vol. 4). Amsterdam: North Holland.
Woolfolk, A. (2012). Educational psychology (12th ed.). New York, NY: Pearson.
JUTTA ALLMENDINGER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
President of the WZB (Social Science Research Center Berlin) and professor
of sociology at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Jutta Allmendinger received her training in sociology and social psychology at the University of Mannheim (MA 1982), the University of Wisconsin
and Harvard University (PhD 1989) and the Free University of Berlin (Habilitation, i.e., second book, in 1993).
Jutta Allmendinger worked at the Center for Educational Sciences at the
University of Wisconsin and at Harvard University (1984–1988). From 1988
to 1991, she was with the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development
in Berlin. From1992 to 2007, she was a full professor of sociology at the
Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich and from 2003 to 2007 the
director of the Institute for Employment Research (Institut für Arbeitsmarktund Berufsforschung der Bundesagentur für Arbeit, IAB) in Nürnberg.
Jutta Allmendinger was a fellow at the Harvard Business School from 1991
to 1992 and at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at
Stanford University from 1996–1997. She was chairperson of the German
Society for Sociology (DGS) from 1999 to 2002. In 2009, she received the
Communicator Award—Science Award of the Donors’ Association, awarded
by the German Research Foundation (DFG) to researchers who have been
exceptionally successful in communicating their scientific findings to the
public.
Jutta Allmendinger is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of
Sciences and Humanities (BBAW), the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina and the high-level economic expert group “Innovation for
Growth” of the European Commission.
MARCEL HELBIG SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Marcel Helbig is a researcher at the president’s project group at WZB (Social
Science Research Center Berlin).
Learning Across the Life Course
9
He received his training in sociology, social science, and Communication
Studies at University of Erfurt (BA 2004) and Humboldt University of Berlin
(MA 2007; Dr. phil. 2012).
Marcel Helbig worked since 2007 at the WZB among others in research
group “Education and Transitions into the Labour Market” and in the project
group “National Educational Panel Study: Vocational Education and Lifelong Learning.”
His main research interests are the gender-specific change in educational
success, educational differences among different social groups, and the influence of educational systems on social inequality.
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