How Employer Interests and Investments Shape Advanced Skill Formation

In many countries around the world, higher education today offers the most assured pathways to secure careers and low unemployment rates. Yet, increasingly some groups—not least the college graduates and their families who are paying ever-higher tuition fees—question the long taken-for-granted contributions that higher education makes to individuals and society as a whole. Despite mass expansion, societies struggle to achieve their goal of “college for all”—due in part to limited public or corporate funding for affordable study opportunities. Although participation rates have climbed worldwide, higher-education systems continue to produce winners (“insiders”) and losers (“outsiders”), even as the “schooled society” shifts the occupational structure upward. Furthermore, market-oriented higher-education systems, notably in the US and UK, face increasing privatization, which also involves financializing university governance. Many states have retrenched investments that had once underwritten the flourishing of universities and their moves toward massification. Tensions have deepened over who should pay for rising costs, exacerbated in an era of increasing status competition via higher education. In the face of such challenges globally, which alternatives exist? A prominent possibility, pioneered in Germany in the 1970s, is the “dual-study” program. These hybrid programs fully integrate phases of higher-education study and paid work in firms; students are simultaneously trainees. In the short term, firms receive inexpensive labor; in the medium term, they benefit from personnel trained in the relevant context. Yet, firms invest not only in recruiting and training motivated future full-fledged employees. They also collab-
orate with higher-education institutions to develop specific curricula that promise to craft skilled workers needed in the future. In these programs, employers and educators cooperate to provide coursework in “dual”-learning settings: on campus and in the workplace. Together, they shape a labor force oriented toward current challenges and opportunities in specific sectors, such as engineering and economics or business. Dual-study programs manifest ways in which employer interests and investments are shaping advanced skill formation.