Too much education?

It's like when everybody drives a Ferrari, how can you be special, mumbled the pundit.

High pitched squabbles about education are one of our favorite subjects in the media besides Christmas, Easter, assorted terrorists and their complements (assorted law and order freaks), and the kinds of bacteria on a keyboard or smartphone.

For years, much of the mainstream education debate in Germany has centered around the increase of college students and the reorganization of the higher education system. Some of the old barriers to higher education were abolished, allowing, for instance, young people to go to college after a vocational training program.

The persistent fact that your social background continued to determine your chances in life more than in many other Western countries was largely ignored. Opening up academic education to graduates of vocational training programs was not a strategy to change this. It was driven largely by demographics and the appearance of vocational jobs as dead end careers.

German students who wanted to keep their option of college open, would go through the full 13 years of high school, then go into a 2.5  to 3.5 year vocational program and enter the labor market. Too late, in the view of German business. Even worse, many of these young people would then go to college for another four or five years.

The mantra of maintaining the competitive edge of the German economy, combined with the obviously reasonable removal of barriers that had existed since the dawn of the modern education system worked.

The number of college educated citizens continued to rise. Education budgets for colleges continued to fall.

Predictably, the mantra became too many graduates, not enough money!

Predictably, both are overstated: in recent international comparisons, Germany's college education rates are not among the top, and the money question revolves around priorities. If every single pothole must be repaired in places where the population is decreasing, something's got to give.

Sadly, social stratification through education - or rather the absence of it - is not only acknowledged but is being justified in major German papers with the most flimsy or arguments.

In Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a recent article was entitled "Social background  becoming determining factor again" [our translation of Die Herkunft wird wieder entscheidend.] The title implies that there was a time when social background was not the main determinant but does not elaborate on this.

The key sentence of the article, to us, is this:
Die Herkunft prägt schließlich immer auch die Motivation und Ambitionen eines jungen Menschen, sie fließt ein in die Berufswahl. 
[Our translation: After all, the social background also shapes the motivation and ambitions of a young person, it influences the choice of career.]

An interesting statement in the overall context of the article*, we decided to use it as a challenge to our readers: We did not check the author's background, but we bet that the author of the newspaper article is, at minimum, from a German educated middle class background. Which we define as at least one parent having a college education and working in a profession (white collar).

Feel free to accept the bet. If you win, we will send you our Susan B. Anthony one dollar coin. Shipping on us because we have not managed to find a taker in almost two years of blogging.
 
Our grumpy TheEditor has its** own opinion on the article: "shows there is no such thing as too much education".

* Which is based on a Stanford study. Of the U.S. system.
 ** TheEditor insists on gender neutrality.