COLUMN ONE : The Trade Secrets of Denmark : After years of resistance, Americans are seeking a crash course in vocational arts. Their role models are the Danes, who have built a strong tradition of blue-collar super-schools and apprenticeships.
If Morten Rendum lived in the United States, he would probably be a high school dropout, or, at best, a graduate with no marketable skills and no idea of what he wanted to do next.
But he lives in Denmark and, at 21, he is just finishing his schooling.
It’s not exactly a high school that he attends, and it’s certainly not a college. Rather, Hillerod Technical School is a kind of institution that scarcely exists in the United States: A place where students in their late teens and early 20s learn a trade by combining classroom work with a paid apprenticeship.
Rendum’s trade is bricklaying. On a recent day he was taking his final exam--building a waist-high structure according to a plan supplied by his instructor--and looking forward to a job he has lined up working on a new pier in Copenhagen harbor.
“I’ve learned a lot here,” said the blond, boyish Rendum. “I think I’m ready for what’s ahead.”
Rendum embodies Denmark’s answer to a riddle that has left most American educators perplexed: What to do with those of high school age who don’t have the right stuff for college? Like Germany, Switzerland, Austria and, to lesser degrees, many other Western European nations, Denmark has managed to keep most of these young people from falling into an educational black hole.
At the same time, Denmark is doing much better than the United States at training young people for increasingly sophisticated jobs in technology. Employers here generally need look no further than the immediate graduates of commercial and technical schools for entry-level workers with the required skills and maturity.
European firms with experience on both sides of the Atlantic say the United States lags far behind. Siemens, a German appliance and electronics manufacturer, has developed apprentice programs at three of its American plants to compensate for what it calls a “sometimes dramatic shortage of skilled and qualified workers.”
In the United States, unlike Europe, vocational education has long been the ill-treated stepchild of public school systems. For much of its history, America has not needed to train workers; when particular skills have been in short supply, it could always attract highly trained immigrants.
“Essentially our high schools are for the college-bound,” said Herbert J. Grover, director of Wisconsin’s new vocational education program. “But only half of our kids go to college, and only half of them make it to the end. We’ve got to do something for the rest.”
Some places are just beginning to. Grover’s office has started an apprentice program in printing for high school juniors and seniors. And in a most unlikely combination, Tulsa, Okla., is emulating the vocational system of the tiny Alpine principality of Liechtenstein.
The Clinton Administration also is on board. Its education bill, to be unveiled soon, is expected to authorize $1.2 billion over four years to help school districts launch apprenticeship programs.
In fact, many American educators have become so enthusiastic that Europeans are warning them to take it easy.
“There is a risk of naively admiring the European systems and trying to impose them on the United States,” said Marianne Durand-Drouhin, an education specialist with the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, whose members are the world’s 24 leading industrial nations. Europe’s approach to vocational education, she said, works only because of a long tradition of cooperation among employers, workers, trade unions and school systems.
The Danish system dates back 102 years and grew from an apprenticeship program run by craft guilds since the Middle Ages. Many European countries can gear the course content of their vocational schools according to nationally established standards for skills required in white- and blue-collar professions.
“You can’t create this kind of cooperation overnight,” said Jens Pehrson, Denmark’s general inspector for vocational education, who is a little embarrassed by the recent praise heaped on Denmark’s vocational education program.
In the United States, reformers must cope with union rules, teacher training requirements and rivalries between high schools and community colleges. What few European-style programs there are in the United States began only after local educators and business leaders knocked heads together to surmount these obstacles.
Even before they confront these bureaucratic roadblocks, reformers must deal with Americans’ disdain for making a living with your hands rather than your brain. “Blue-collar jobs are considered second- or third-rate” in the United States, said Andre Siegenthaler, a Swiss-born business executive who helped set up Tulsa’s apprentice program. “Everybody feels they have to go to college and be a doctor or a lawyer.”
But from the American perspective, Europe has the reverse problem: It limits college education to an elite few. Many European countries force young people to make a nearly irrevocable choice between college and vocational education when they are 16 or so. “Late bloomers”--those who do not get serious about their future until they are older--may find themselves shut out.
In Denmark, only the top one-third of 16-year-olds are judged to be college material. Most of the others, often after taking a year or more off, go into the system’s vocational track and divide about evenly between business and technical schools.
Germany sends a somewhat higher percentage of students on an academic track. Yet even there, said MIT economist Lisa M. Lynch, at least 75% of Germans have received on-the-job training by the time they reach 25, compared with 3% of American men and less than 1% of American women.
It’s no coincidence, Lynch said, that worker productivity has increased more slowly in the United States (0.7% a year from 1979 to 1991) than in Germany (1.4%), Denmark (2.3%) and other Western European countries except Greece.
Nor is European-style vocational education more expensive than the American approach, at least not to taxpayers. Denmark spends $100 less in public funds than the U.S. average of about $4,400 per high school student, according to the OECD, and Germany pays $1,700 less. Employers must pay apprentices’ salaries--usually about the minimum wage--but they believe the investment pays the dividend of a well-trained work force.
In Germany, students spend two days a week in the classroom and the other three on the job. In less densely populated Denmark, where school and job may be far apart, periods of classroom instruction and on-the-job training last weeks and even months.
Hillerod, a largely upper-middle-class town of 33,000 about 25 miles north of Copenhagen, is a good place to see the Danish system in action. Hillerod Business School prepares its 1,750 regular students for careers ranging from retail sales to international commerce. Hillerod Technical School, with about 1,500 students at any one time, trains for blue-collar jobs, including auto mechanics, metalworkers and bakers.
At each, the basic program is three years. Students may start when they are 16 or older, if they dropped out of school.
Ideally, Hillerod’s vocational students find apprenticeships with local employers and rotate between on-the-job training and classroom work. In the teeth of Denmark’s 12.3% unemployment rate, not all students can find apprenticeships. For them, Hillerod has developed inventive ways of simulating on-the-job training.
Business student Charlotte Madsen, 20, is working at a downtown shop that sells cowboy boots, hats and other paraphernalia. It’s like any other shop, except that the school owns and runs it. “It’s just as good here as in a regular job,” Madsen said. “Maybe better, because there’s somebody here to show us how to do it.”
Last December, 22 students went to work at the shop. Only 10 remain. The others have found jobs.
Operating a store can be expensive; the cowboy shop is a long way from turning a profit. So for other students without apprenticeships, the business school has set up two imaginary companies, one selling gifts and the other, books. The students transact business by computer with a network of 50 other imaginary firms in Denmark, 1,100 in Germany and smaller numbers in most other European countries.
At both the business and technical schools, classroom instruction is an important part of the curriculum. Students take academic subjects--Danish, English, math, computers--in their first year, then switch to courses more directly related to their jobs.
Especially at the technical school, students wonder why they need to bother with academic subjects such as English and math. One answer is the Danish belief that better-educated people make better citizens.
Michael Porskjaer, one of Hillerod Technical’s administrators, has another answer. Many students, he predicts, will eventually start businesses and will need to know how to use computers and to communicate in languages other than Danish, which is spoken by only 5 million people around the globe.
Preparing young people for careers, standard operating procedure in Hillerod, remains the exception in the United States. “America may have the worst school-to-work transition system of any advanced industrial country,” observed the Rochester, N.Y.-based National Center on Education and the Economy in a 1990 report. A former board member with the center, Ira Magaziner, now is a top aide to President Clinton.
CDS International, an Indianapolis group that promotes the international exchange of information about vocational education, has accompanied American educators and executives to Denmark and Germany to show them what Europe can do. Among the visitors, Wisconsin officials were so impressed they set up a two-year apprenticeship program in printing in two school districts.
In one district, students spend half a day in the classroom and half on the job. In the other, the schedule is two days a week at school and three at the plant. Twenty high school juniors began last September in the program’s first year--a tiny number, but a start.
The cost to the participating printing companies is substantial--up to $50,000 a year, not only to cover apprentices’ salaries but also to pay skilled workers responsible for training them.
But to James Milslagle, vice president of Banta Corp. in Menasha, which has two apprentices from the program’s first class and will add two more in September, that is a small price to pay. “There is no question that these students will be better prepared when they finish the program,” Milslagle said. “They’ll know much more about the industry, and they’ll be much more mature--they’ll know how to get up in the morning and go to work. They’re developing a work ethic.”
The initiative for Tulsa’s apprenticeship program in metal-working came from Siegenthaler, a vice president of the Liechtenstein-based Hilti Corp., a fastener manufacturer. When he was transferred to Tulsa in 1989, Siegenthaler found that the plant there was proud of the modern equipment it had on the factory floor.
“But I found something was missing--the skill of the workers,” he said. So, working through the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce, he rounded up five other companies, including American Airlines, that despaired of finding qualified workers in the ranks of the city’s high school graduates.
Last September, those six employers opened metalworking slots to 16 juniors. Altogether, Tulsa’s program will last four years, at the end of which companies will have invested upward of $120,000 in each apprentice’s training.
Employers run the risk that their apprentices, when fully trained, will take their skills elsewhere. But “if employers have a young person in-house for four years and can’t keep him, they don’t deserve him,” said Wayne Rowley, director of new business development at the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce.
Altogether, said Karen Sieber, a CDS International official, the apprenticeship programs in Wisconsin and Tulsa are among perhaps a couple dozen pilot programs in the country. “But they’re just that--pilot programs,” she said. “We need to make the programs systematic.”
Dropping Out vs. Staying In
The percentage of young people from age 15 to 19 who were enrolled in school in the 1989-1990 academic year.
15 16 17 18 19 Denmark 98% 92% 78% 68% 52% France 94 90% 86% 71% 56% Germany 99 99 96 81 59 Britain 100 77 59 38 30 U.S. 98 94 80 58 48
The percentage of adults from age 25 to 64 who had graduated from high school and who had completed college as of 1989. Denmark High school graduates: 57% College graduates: 10%
France High school graduates: 50% College graduates: 7%
Germany High school graduates: 78% College graduates: 10%
Britain High school graduates: 65% College graduates: 9%
U.S. High school graduates: 81% College graduates: 23%
Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
