Munich — For years, Germany has been something of a global poster child for apprenticeships. Schoolchildren are traditionally sorted at an early age into vocational or college tracks. Students in the college track go to universities, while those in the vocational track enter practical apprenticeships. They spend three years doing on-the-job training in fields from plumbing and manufacturing to banking, earning a modest salary as they do. Although they do take trade-school classes before entering the full-time workforce, and some eventually make their way to college, college isn’t part of this model.
The Big Idea: At a time of considerable debate about the effectiveness and career value of U.S. higher education, these German-style apprenticeships—descended from medieval guilds in which expert craftsmen passed on their skills to a new generation—are now frequently proposed as a better alternative to college for many young Americans.
But with little fanfare outside Germany, the country’s vaunted apprenticeships have become less popular. Instead of bypassing college for apprenticeships, growing numbers of young people are enrolling in a new kind of college: career-focused institutions known as universities of applied sciences. These relatively new universities attract a broad range of students who want to pursue postsecondary studies but with clear practical applications. And they are giving traditional research-oriented universities a run for their money, now enrolling nearly half of new undergraduates: 48% compared to 51% at classical universities.
What’s more, their practical emphasis has made them natural partners with employers for a small but growing path known as dual studies, or duales studium. This model combines applied-sciences degrees with a new kind of apprenticeship, giving participants a both/and mix of theory and practice. The number of these degree apprenticeships rose to record levels in 2022; they now make up nearly 5% of German higher education enrollment.
On the Ground: Consider 35-year-old Fabian Schauer. As a child in a small village in Bavaria, Schauer was something of a pioneer. His parents and close relatives had not attended university. All had completed the traditional apprenticeships that were long the hallmarks of Germany’s education-to-workforce system. But Schauer was a strong student who became the first in his family to take the abitur, an academically focused high school exit exam, and to enroll at the prestigious Technical University of Munich.
Within a semester, however, his plan foundered. Even with free tuition, Schauer couldn’t afford an apartment in Munich, and the two-hour, 90-mile round trip became too much of a burden. Staying in college “was not worth it,” he told me.
So Schauer found a new path. He enrolled in a degree apprenticeship program in which he earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at the Technische Hochschule Nürnberg Georg Simon Ohm, a university of applied sciences in Nuremberg. Simultaneously, he got practical work experience as an apprentice for Siemens in nearby Erlangen. The multinational technology giant—like other employers, eager to stay competitive by hiring a well-prepared and educated workforce—paid him a modest salary throughout the four years it took him to complete his education and training.
State of Play: Germany’s traditional apprenticeships have not gone away. And even though demand for higher education is growing, Germany lingers at the lower end of postsecondary degree attainment compared to most other Western industrialized countries. Still, the mixture of classroom theory and real-world practice that solved Schauer’s problem reflects a strong public appetite for a new approach—more opportunities to learn beyond secondary school in settings that combine scholarship with a focus on careers.
The result has been a striking, decades-long rise in higher education enrollment, particularly at universities of applied sciences. The appeal of these new institutions, combined with more options for students on the vocational track to enter higher education, explains why today, one in four German university students has previously completed an apprenticeship.
The growing interest in the degree apprenticeship model that Schauer pursued makes perfect sense to Frank Ziegele, executive director of the CHE, or Center for Higher Education, a German think tank. “People want the best of both worlds: practical and theoretical,” he says. “They want to pick something from vocational training, they want to pick something from academia … it’s not about one-size-fits-all approaches. It’s about a diversity of paths.”
In the 19th century, Germany was the birthplace of the modern research university. Yet until fairly recently, the university track was a privilege reserved for a small elite. By the second half of the 20th century, however, Germany began to expand access to higher education for the first time. In 1960, just 6% percent of young people were eligible to enter university. Soon, though, new universities were created to address the growing concern that the German economy needed more workers with academic qualifications. The percentage of schoolchildren enrolling at an academic high school known as the Gymnasium increased significantly. The number of students entering university grew nearly 43% in the decade from 2005 to 2015, reaching 500K annually—and by 2023 the proportion of teenagers who became university eligible by passing the abitur exam grew to 50%.
Alongside this trend, the number of new apprenticeships declined. New firm-based apprenticeship contracts dropped from more than 600K in 2007 to about 500K in 2016. When the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce surveyed 15K companies in 2022, it found that 42% couldn’t fill all their apprenticeship slots the previous year. Fifty-four percent of German youth began apprenticeships in 2019, down from 58% in 2011. The numbers dropped even lower when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Demography is a factor: 16 is the age at which most students who wish to participate in apprenticeships leave school, and the number of 16 year-olds is declining. (For the same reason, university enrollment has also gone down for the past few years.) But it’s not the only factor.
“The classical apprenticeship system has lost a bit of attractiveness,” says Harald Pfeifer, an economist at the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB) in Bonn. For reasons including career potential, higher wages, and parental preferences, “more and more people have the choice to go to university, and many do.”
Economic Mobility: The advent of universities of applied sciences in the late 1960s is also key. Between 2005 and 2022, the number of students at universities of applied sciences like the one Schauer attended almost doubled. Those undergrads may have less interest in research-focused degrees than their predecessors in earlier generations. But they increasingly see applied higher education, in Ziegele’s words, as “a chance to move up the social ladder” and improve their career prospects. When they combine those career-oriented degrees with apprenticeships, they feel particularly well-positioned for future economic opportunities.
Julien Scheer, a team lead at the Siemens Mobility train manufacturing facility in northwest Munich and a graduate of the degree apprenticeship program, says learning both theory and practice was extremely useful. “You would learn something theoretical—how the material works, how it changes its structure, materials science—then the next day you were on the shop floor sawing something or welding something,” says Scheer, who now oversees apprentices himself. “That was really cool, to actually see something that you’re doing, and understanding exactly how it works.”
Degree apprenticeships are a significant time commitment, and this does discourage some students from participating. They’re less likely to be able to enjoy long university vacations, or study for a semester outside Germany. But of course being paid softens the blow—and for students without significant family support it’s crucial to being able to study in the first place. “You don’t have to worry about money problems,” says Scheer. Particularly in an expensive city like Munich, students from modest backgrounds without income from a dual-studies employer often have to work part-time jobs to pay for rent and food.
Thomas Leubner, global head of Siemens Professional Education, says the company’s cost-benefit analysis of its large dual studies program has left no room for doubt. “We have made many calculations for Siemens, and we came to the result ‘Yes, it’s a good deal—it’s a positive business case,’” he told me in the large Munich office park where many apprentices and dual studies trainees do their training. Dual studies graduates have already worked productively with colleagues on the shop floor or other job sites, he says. So someone who starts work as a full-fledged employee can “hit the ground running. There is no more onboarding, which is also a lot of cost.”
The Skeptics: Not everyone is sold on this model. Julian Nida-Rümelin is a philosopher and public intellectual who served as minister for culture in the government of former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Over coffee at the Literaturhaus in central Munich, Nida-Rümelin explains that advocates of increased higher education enrollment, including degree apprenticeships, miss the underlying economic and cultural value of strictly vocational paths. In his view, the decline in traditional apprenticeships, along with the growing popularity of universities—a trend he called “academic mania” in a 2014 book—has reduced the availability of workers with highly developed technical skills. Yet it is those well-trained workers who helped build Germany’s “hidden champions”—the little-known, small and medium-sized firms producing niche products, from sunroofs for cars to metal filters, that have made an outsized contribution to Germany’s economic success.
At root, Nida-Rümelin worries that the dignity of all kinds of work risks being undermined by an excessive emphasis on formal education. “The basic philosophical idea behind it is to take equality, and equal respect, seriously. So that means you don’t have to have an academic degree in order to have some role in society,” he says.
But others say that the growing popularity of degree apprenticeships, universities of applied sciences, and higher education more broadly simply reflects a clear payoff for the student. In 2017, Ludger Woessman, director of the Ifo Center for the Economics of Education at the University of Munich, researched the estimated lifetime incomes for those who’ve completed apprenticeships and degrees in a range of fields. Future earnings varied considerably by field of study for university graduates, as they do in the U.S. They also differed based on the employment sector for apprentices. But the average wage premium for degrees was enormous.
“There’s literally no degree that didn’t have a positive return compared to the average apprenticeship,” Woessman says. “At some stage people just realize, ‘Look, all these more highly educated people make so much more money. Whereas in these apprenticeships you really have to work hard and then actually don’t make as much money.’”
One of the reasons university graduates earn more is that advanced education provides broad, transferable skills with long-term career value. Woessman’s research with U.S. economist Eric Hanushek and others found the general education skills acquired in university provide valuable career flexibility over an individual’s lifetime. When they compared long-term labor market outcomes of vocational education to those of general education, they found that the near-term advantages of apprenticeships in facilitating the school-to-work transition “may be offset by less adaptability and diminished employment later in life.”
Permeable Paths: For Ziegele, the need for a system with flexibility between academic and vocational tracks is paramount. “In my ideal world,” he says, “a young person who graduates from secondary school should go into a certain career path, or an educational path, but should know that there is every chance to change the path—to move to another track, to go back and forth.” In fact, says Samuel Mühlemann, a University of Munich professor of human resource education and development, this kind of “permeability” between tracks is vital to keeping apprenticeships attractive to high-ability young people: “Otherwise they will always remain a ‘second-best’ option for those who do not qualify for the academic track.”
Indeed, other countries are embracing a range of more flexible approaches to career-focused postsecondary education and training. In Ethiopia, the government has transformed traditional research universities in many regions into universities of applied sciences. The U.K. introduced degree apprenticeships in 2015 and continues to promote these industry-led partnerships. In the U.S., Reach University combines apprenticeships with degrees for teachers. It created the National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree, a nonprofit that aims to advance this learn-and-earn combination nationwide and to create 3M apprenticeship degrees by 2035. And in a noteworthy September 2024 deal, Reach sold a technology platform that helps foster apprenticeship degrees to the giant online Western Governors University.
It is too soon to know precisely how German demographic changes and a shifting economy will interact with the evolving preferences of young Germans. But their growing interest in a new mixture of classroom knowledge and practical work experience is already providing a strikingly different model which the U.S. might embrace. In both countries, degree apprenticeships seem likely to grow.
Ben Wildavsky is a visiting fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, host of the Higher Ed Spotlight podcast, and the author of two books, including “The Career Arts: Making the Most of College, Credentials, and Connections.” This article was adapted from his book-in-progress on what the U.S. can learn from education-to-workforce initiatives in other countries, reported while serving as a 2024 writer in residence at Salzburg Global Seminar.