Vocational education in the United States and in Romania

The impact of education on economic growth and development has become an

important issue of analysis only since the last period of the XXth century, when there was a
shift in the way in which education was seen. Influenced by German immigrants who knew
the German apprenticeship system, the interest in the German education system became very
high. The major source of economic growth is human capital accumulation and, therefore, the
main cause of the differences between nations in terms of living standards resides in different
human capital endowment (Lucas:1993). Employers needed skilled workers in that period too,
because of the economic situtation and, thus, the focus was directed towards vocational
training which implied a new systematic approach to the whole education system.
(Kreysing:1).

Sadler, a member of the English Board of Education from 1895 to 1903 argues that:

In studying foreign systems of education we should not forget that the things outside
the schools matter even more than the things inside the schools, and govern and
interpret the things inside. We cannot wander at pleasure among the educational
systems of the world, like a child strolling through a garden, and pick off a flower
from one bush and some leaves from another, and then expect that if we stick what we
have gathered into the soil at home, we shall have a living plant. A national system of
education is a living thing, the outcome of forgotten struggles and of battles long
ago. It has in it some of the secret workings of national life.

(Phillips:15)

This statement is important to be taken into consideration in this research since it points out
that one should focus on the historical background of education and its changes along the
years. In this regard, a brief presentation of the reforms that influenced the growth of
vocational education in history is needed.

According to Kreysings article on the reforms and resuts concerning vocational

education in the United States, the first official act in this discussion may have been the
Smith-Hughes Act from 1917 which promoted vocational education in high schools, where
most courses were related to agriculture and home economics. However, vocational education
played only a minor role in high schools until the beginning of the 1960s. The Vocational
Education Act 1963 offered funds to improve vocational education programmes in the
states.However, the growing problem of youth unemployment attracted national interest in
vocational education. In 1973 Congress passed the Comprehensive Employment and Training
Act (CETA) which was succeeded by the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA). The
proponents of a change in the education system also looked to the German and Japanese
system where the workplace plays a crucial role in education. After the inauguration of
President Clinton his secretary of labor, Robert Reich, endeavoured to establish a
comprehensive school-to-work system so as to improve the occupational qualification of
young people. His efforts resulted in the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994.
 Kreysing also distinguishes between three major components that have an impact on
education reform and, respectively, vocational training: employer and trade union cooperation
is crucial, along with a good relation between government institutions and federal, state, local
authorities which organize the training programmes and, last but not least, the teachers and
parents, who have the powee to influence the practice of these programmes, the type of
courses and even the number of students participating.

Employers participation in this type of education also represents a key factor for its
success, since there is a need for workplaces. There are certain factors that motivate
employers to engage in helping high-school students find training places. Some may see it as
a form of commitment and responsability to help their communities, others may see it as an
opprtunity to get good, lower-paid part-time help from the students and other employers may
see it as a good chance to recruit future workers while investing in their training. Yet,
developing aq large scale school-to-work system is hard, since the problems of training costs
are bigger than individual or collective motiovation of the employers to train skilled workers
and most of them just solve these problems by emplying already trained, adult workers.

What I am going to do next is give the example of a German company from the United
States, South Carolina, that is training students in skilled labor following the German
apprenticeship system, as presented in an article in New York Times written by Nelson D.
Schwartz in 2013. When finding out that there is no more skilled work force to hire in his
factory, the employer, Joerg Klisch, set out to train them himself by working with five local
high schools and a career center and resulting in his factory now having nine juniors and
seniors enrolled in its apprenticeship program. Thomas E. Perez, the secretary of labor argues
that the Americans have refrettably and mistakenly devalued apprenticeships and training over
the course of the last couple of decades and that this thing must be changed.

The European interest in what regars this type of education is huge, as European companies
are major employers in the state, with more than 28,000 workers for German companies
alone. Brad Neese, director of Apprenticeship Carolina, which links the states technical
college system with private companies to help create specialized programs, has traveled to
Germany, Austria and Switzerland, where apprenticeships are thriving, youth unemployment
is relatively low and blue-collar jobs are still prized in order to learn more and help develop
his program. In United States, the economic fortunes of younger people with just a high
school diploma have plummeted, and the unemployment rate among workers age 16 to 19
stands at more than 20 percent.

Werner Eikenbusch, manager of work force development for BMW in the Americas, is
himself the product of an apprenticeship program in Germany who later went back to school
and earned a masters degree in engineering. He helped create the BMW Scholars program in
2011, he said, to build the skills from the ground up. And, to get a sense of how and
apprenticeship student thinks: It is a struggle, but if you know how to manage the time, it is
not hard, said Benjamin Peoples, a 27-year-old BMW Scholar who dropped out of Clemson
University a few years ago because he could no longer afford it. I wanted to work with my
hands and with machines, but I didnt have experience with robots.
Romania has also made steps towards the modernisation of its system. In spite all of the
efforts, there is yet no systematic, comprehensive and coherent approach to the reform
process. With regard to the percentage of graduates, by level of education, in Romania, in the
academic years 2004-2005 and 2010-2011:

Level of education Academic year

2004-2005 2010-2011
Primary and lower secondary 36.70% 34.00%
education
Post-high school and foremen 2.60% 3.20%
education
Vocational education 21.10% 5.10%
Upper secondary education 24.60% 30.00%
(High-school)
Tertiary education 15.00% 27.70%

Source: Adapted from Romanian Statistical Yearbook, Education, 2007, and Romanian
Statistical Yearbook, Education, 2013

Laura Diaconu (Maxim), assistant professor at Alexandru Ioan Cuza Univeristy of Iasi,
Romania, tries to explain the decreasing number of those who graduated from vocational
schools in Romania: the vocational education and training system in Romania is
characterised by a high degree of centralisation, a weak school infrastructure (due to under-
investment for a long period of time), a lack of well trained administrative personnel in the
bodies responsible for vocational education and training, a lack of well prepared teachers and
an outdated and narrow curricula in the majority of schools. (Diaconu:102)
Works cited
Lucas, R.E. (1993), Making a miracle, Econometrica, Vol. 61, No. 2, pp. 251-272, retrieved
fromhttp://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2951551?
uid=3738920&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21103875766993

Phillips, David (1993): Borrowing Educational Policy, in: David Finegold/Laurel

McFarland/William Richardson (Hg.), Something Borrowed, Something Learned? The
Transatlantic Market in Education and Training Reform, Washington, DC, S. 13- 20

Diaconu (Maxim), L. (2014). Education and labour market outcomes in Romania. Eastern
Journal of European Studies.Volume 5. Issue 1. Retrieved from
http://ejes.uaic.ro/articles/EJES2014_0501_DIA.pdf

Kreysing, M.(2001) Vocational education in the United States: reforms and results. European
Journal. No.23.Vocational Training. Retrieved from
http://www.cedefop.europa.eu/files/etv/Upload/Information_resources/Bookshop/232/
23_en_kreysing.pdf

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/business/where-factory-apprenticeship-is-latest-model-
from-germany.html