In Germany students who completed 9 years of schooling are allowed to work. That means you do get on-the-job apprenticeships that start at 15⁄16 years of age. For people under 18, there’s a maximum of working 40 hours per week and no work on weekends (there are a few expectations for weekend work).
You need 12⁄13 years of schooling to be accepted into a German university and getting to that point is a sign of status on the job market.
To get more teenagers into productive work you would need to reduce the status that academic credentials bring with them.
A billionaire who wants that to happen could shift the hiring practices of his corporation to be strictly guided by what predicts new employees achieving high KPI scores.
On the political side, you can attack requirements for college degrees as structural racism if you are on the left or as inhibiting the free market if you are on the right. While it would be hard to argue for woke people that the requirement is not structural racism it’s obviously an unpopular argument among woke college students.
You could pass a law that says that any employer who requires a college degree has to write into his job applications explicitly why a college degree is required and open up lawsuits for those cases where people get discriminated against for not having a college degree.
In the 19th century, Germany had a three-class voting system and also a three-class school system. While we switched our voting system, we kept our three-class school system.
In the US you have the idea of the American dream where in principle anyone can reach the upper class (even when the Americans hate to use the term upper class). If you believe that 12 years of schooling are a requirement for reaching upper class and you want to get everyone to upper class it makes sense to give everyone 12 years of schooling.
In the US class has a lot to do with race. The German class system is built in a way that assumes that important class differences are not about race as it assumes most of the citizens are Germans. In the US middle class often means something like not being Black but there’s the pretense that it doesn’t.
Americans who want to overcome racism, then do things like letting universities have a quota for accepting a certain number of Black people to give them access to the middle class. From a German perspective, it’s very unclear why a plumber who’s middle class should have a college degree. It does make sense if you actually want a plumber who isn’t Black when you can filter for that by requiring a college degree.
If you are in Washington and don’t want a Black person to look after your kids but don’t want to admit that you don’t want a Black person to look after your kids, requiring a college degree for that work makes a lot of sense.
It’s worth saying that these days German culture isn’t very strong and we switch a lot to the Anglo-Saxon way of doing things.
In Germany students who completed 9 years of schooling are allowed to work. That means you do get on-the-job apprenticeships that start at 15⁄16 years of age. For people under 18, there’s a maximum of working 40 hours per week and no work on weekends (there are a few expectations for weekend work).
You need 12⁄13 years of schooling to be accepted into a German university and getting to that point is a sign of status on the job market.
To get more teenagers into productive work you would need to reduce the status that academic credentials bring with them.
A billionaire who wants that to happen could shift the hiring practices of his corporation to be strictly guided by what predicts new employees achieving high KPI scores.
On the political side, you can attack requirements for college degrees as structural racism if you are on the left or as inhibiting the free market if you are on the right. While it would be hard to argue for woke people that the requirement is not structural racism it’s obviously an unpopular argument among woke college students.
You could pass a law that says that any employer who requires a college degree has to write into his job applications explicitly why a college degree is required and open up lawsuits for those cases where people get discriminated against for not having a college degree.
Do you know of any drawbacks to the apprenticeship system in Germany? I wonder why that isn’t more common across the world.
In the 19th century, Germany had a three-class voting system and also a three-class school system. While we switched our voting system, we kept our three-class school system.
In the US you have the idea of the American dream where in principle anyone can reach the upper class (even when the Americans hate to use the term upper class). If you believe that 12 years of schooling are a requirement for reaching upper class and you want to get everyone to upper class it makes sense to give everyone 12 years of schooling.
In the US class has a lot to do with race. The German class system is built in a way that assumes that important class differences are not about race as it assumes most of the citizens are Germans. In the US middle class often means something like not being Black but there’s the pretense that it doesn’t.
Americans who want to overcome racism, then do things like letting universities have a quota for accepting a certain number of Black people to give them access to the middle class. From a German perspective, it’s very unclear why a plumber who’s middle class should have a college degree. It does make sense if you actually want a plumber who isn’t Black when you can filter for that by requiring a college degree.
If you are in Washington and don’t want a Black person to look after your kids but don’t want to admit that you don’t want a Black person to look after your kids, requiring a college degree for that work makes a lot of sense.
It’s worth saying that these days German culture isn’t very strong and we switch a lot to the Anglo-Saxon way of doing things.