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Different but equal? Assessing European dual HE systems

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Abstract

In higher education dual systems, graduates are qualified to apply for jobs in same professional fields along two separated educational routes. The research problem is whether the rival applicants for professional positions are treated equally in the labour market despite their different qualifications. From the graduates point of view, to be equal means to have an opportunity to be employed in accordance with one’s professional skill. Applying European survey data, the article tests to what extent the ‘distribution of work’ between university and non-university graduates seems to be based on educational qualifications or actual competence. Among 4,000 German, Dutch, Finnish, and Swiss graduates primarily in business and administration and engineering, only slight and occasional evidence of ‘status-based recruitment’ was found. All in all, the research suggests that from the view of graduate employment, the European dual HE systems work very much following the principle of ‘different but equal’.

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Notes

  1. The article does not concern the question to what extent the possible inequality of the two kinds of graduates would be related to, for instance gender inequality. Let us just point out here that the expansion of higher education does not automatically lead to more equal labour market opportunities but includes, for instance, certain parallel female-dominated programmes that result in gender separation instead of equality (Berggren 2007).

  2. We use the German word Fachhochschule to refer also to Swiss universities of applied sciences.

  3. The REFLEX project was funded by the EU 6th Framework Program (contract no: CIT2-CT-2004-506-352). The project involved partners from fourteen countries and was coordinated by the Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market at Maastricht University. For more information, see: http://www.reflexproject.org.

  4. A remarkable amount (from one-fifth to more than one-third by country) of graduates who according to their occupational titles were classified as managers did not have any subordinates. These cases were recoded as professionals or associate professionals, following respondents’ description of their jobs.

  5. The procedure is based on the principle that higher education graduates, if anyone, should be able to assess their own activity through these kinds of conceptualizations. Any other more ‘objective’ method is equally vulnerable to critics saying that these presumed skills and capabilities are nothing but conceptual constructions.

  6. In our vocabulary, knowing how equals doing something skilfully. Typically, knowing how is tacit, mostly it does not originate in ‘knowledge that’ and certainly cannot be reduced to it. (Polanyi 1969; Ryle 1984/1949). As Dewey (1983/1922, MW14, 124–125) says, we know how to do something on the strength of our habits. (Cf. Kivinen 2002).

  7. Relatively many cases missed data for only one or two items. Therefore, in summing the differences we included cases with four missing items at the most. In practice, the missing differences between requirements and skills were set to zero.

  8. Elsewhere, we will take a more analytical approach to separate skill dimensions and their relationships as well as the general problem of measuring competence in survey data.

  9. The specified under-competence rates calculated for the sub-categories of skill dimensions (Table 4 in Appendix 3) show directly what kinds of deficit the total under-competence count consists of.

  10. The low statistical significance of the differences between university and non-university graduates is partly due to wide individual dispersion of the under-competence and, particularly, over-competence values (see standard deviations in Table 4 in Appendix 3).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Unit for the Sociology of Education, RUSE, University of Turku, Turku, 20014, Finland

    Osmo Kivinen & Jouni Nurmi

Authors
  1. Osmo Kivinen
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  2. Jouni Nurmi
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Correspondence to Osmo Kivinen.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 2.

Table 2 Occupational status of university and non-university graduates in analyzed professional fields (%)
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Appendix 2

See Table 3.

Table 3 Skill dimensions classified in main groups
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Appendix 3

See Table 4.

Table 4 Comparison of average under- and over-competence between university and nonuniversity graduates in the field of engineering
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Appendix 4

See Table 5.

Table 5 Comparison of average under- and over-competence between university and non-university graduates in the field of engineering
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Appendix 5

See Table 6.

Table 6 Comparison of average under- and over-competence between university and non-university graduates in the fields of computing, agriculture and forestry, and arts
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Kivinen, O., Nurmi, J. Different but equal? Assessing European dual HE systems. High Educ 60, 369–393 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-009-9305-y

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