The timing of adolescents' school-to-work transition in the course of social change: The example of German unification 1An earlier version of this paper was presented as part of the symposium “Übergang von der Schule in den Beruf [School-to-work transition]” (Chair: Dr. Jutta Heckhausen) at the 7th Tagung Pädagogische Psychologie [Meeting of Educational Psychology], September 13-16,1999, Fribourg, Switzerland. Data of the

Abstract

The school-to-work transition has become more and more individualized over the last decades in the Federal Republic of Germany as in other Western industrialized countries. As compared to the 1950s and 1960s, the current educational system in Germany offers a greater variety of school tracks, apprenticeships, and training programs and provides a greater permeability between schools and programs. German unification offers a unique opportunity to study the influence of social and economic change on the individualization of the school-to-work transition, because change processes, resembling those over the last decades in the West, have been going on in the East in a time-lapse camera fashion. Using retrospective data on transitions gathered from Eastern and Western young adults from vocationally-oriented school tracks in 1991 (representing pre-unification conditions) and 1996, three different studies on the timing of key events in the school-to-work transition are presented. In the first study, aimed at the prediction of interindividual timing variability in transitions, the ages upon completion of training and financial self-support in the East were determined by structural factors such as the age at completion of school which, in turn, could only be predicted by the age at entry into elementary school. In contrast, age variability in the West was also influenced by person and family background variables. In the second study, it could be demonstrated that age variability with regard to completion of school and achievement of financial self-support had markedly increased among younger cohorts of Easterners assessed in 1996 reflecting an increased variety of educational opportunities and labor market obstacles on the pathway to employment. In the third study, two factors, namely prolonged education and unemployment as reflections of institutional and economic change in the East were identified which partly explained the increase in the average age at which Eastern young adults achieved financial independence. All three studies aimed at building a link between properties of the institutional and economic macro-contexts and the ages at key transitions into employment representing comprehensive chronological outcomes. Between these poles, however, there are a multitude of transitional pathways and patterns as well as personality and family factors operating on these patterns. A further inquiry into these psychological factors and mechanisms is a valuable research goal for the future.