From School to Work and Back – Inequality in Late Postsecondary Education As Part of the School to Work Transition in the US, Germany and Sweden

Varieties in the school-to-work-transition are often discussed against the background of differences between education systems and labor markets. The focus of most studies is the integration into the labor market. In this paper, I take a different perspective and compare differences between education systems in a. the patterns of school to work transitions with particular focus on non-traditional education and b. the decision to re-enroll into postsecondary education. In order to explain country differences, I refer to the openness and institutional flexibility for non-traditional students of the postsecondary education system.

Non-traditional patterns, such as late re-enrolment after an initial phase of work, vocational training or motherhood differ by country in their relevance for the typical school-to-work transition. In several industrialized countries, in particular children from lower social origins follow these patterns and take “educational detours”. As a second step, I pay particular attention to the re-enrolment decision, which is sometimes suggested as an option to ease the transition from school to work. Existing single-country studies raise the question how differences are shaped by institutional settings. Therefore, I compare the US, Germany and Sweden regarding to the role of inequality in non-traditional educational careers for school to work transitions. While Sweden and the US clearly are societies with broad and open access to the tertiary education, Germany is an ideal of a rigid, inflexible system. Analyses are carried out using longitudinal micro-data data from Germany (German Life History Study), Sweden (Level of Living Survey) and the US (National Longitudinal Study of Youth, 1979). The findings indicate that in the two open and flexible systems social origin effects on the patterns of educational careers are indeed larger than in inflexible systems such as Germany. However, this is more than compensated by their overall smaller educational inequality.