Tuition Fees: England vs Germany

[mcbook]

This article describes the higher education situation in Germany and highlights that university education is free there while student pay up to £9,000 per annum in England.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-34132664

The key point of interest for me is that in Germany only 27% of young people go into higher education while in England it's 47%. I'm not an expert on the subject but have long thought that too many people go to university and then end up working in jobs they could have gone straight into from high-school. The article mentions a recent CIPD study that seems to back this up.

So, are too many people going to university in England? What should we do with them instead? How about more apprenticeships? Or something entirely different?

[mcbook]

AJS- said:

I suspect it's more to do with Germany having a fairly good apprenticeship system that has been established for a long time rather than the price incentives.

Although I never mentioned this in the post, it was on my mind. Germany are very successful with apprenticeships but they seem to do them properly with rigorous standards and 'blue-collar' work still having a certain prestige that it seems to have lost in the UK.

I would much rather my kids chose to do a decent apprenticeship rather than opted for a questionable degree at a lesser university.

[mcbook]

Martin 480 Turbo said:

Take a look here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_education_syste...

The German educational system is fundamentaly different from the british.

It is quiet usual that a teen chooses an apprenticeship first (for about 3 years), only
to do some further studies later. So 27% going into higher education after school is not fully comparable to british figures.

Those apprenticeships are combined with wide spanning academic education in vocational schools, resulting in young people having irl experience combined with theoretical knowledge that makes them superior to the ones who have "only" done a bachelors degree, from an employers point of view. (This is why every fulltime student over here really strives to do a master thesis.)

Only backside I can see is that the system a little more costly for the companies and the state but it looks like it pays of in the long run.

Thanks for the additional info. Interesting stuff.