Abstract
In Switzerland, the baccalaureate school is an important pathway to university education, and the aspirations of families and students to enter baccalaureate school have grown. However, vocational education and training (VET) remains the predominant educational pathway and has a strong lobby. We investigate how in this context, the transition from primary education to baccalaureate school is governed and justified at the cantonal level. We study how two Swiss cantons try to meet the official or unofficial maximum baccalaureate quotas desired by educational policymakers through different selection procedures and admission criteria. Drawing on the Economics of Conventions, we conceptualize selection procedures as cantonal transition chains and show that the strategies, procedures, and instruments applied in governance are rooted in diverse principles of action. This causes tensions within cantons. Our analysis shows that agency and regulating effects in the governance of transitions must be understood as distributed among actors, technologies, and objects.
Highlights
We focus on the governance of selection to long-term baccalaureate school and policy attempts to regulate the proportion of students entering
Educational transitions have mostly been studied with a focus on the individual that transitions and the factors that influence this transition
We contributed to closing this gap by investigating how educational provision, rules, processes of selection, and policy discourses influence the transition chain to baccalaureate school and how it is realized and legitimized by representatives of educational administration and policymakers
Summary
Controversial Transition Quotas and Admission Regulations in a Highly Federalist, Differentiated, Employment-Centered Education System. The demand for higher education is reinforced by a trend towards academization of society as a whole [3] In this context, the low proportion of baccalaureate students in Switzerland once more points to mechanisms of governance being used to regulate the selection procedure to baccalaureate school. Hasse and Schmidt investigated how allocation agreements are reached between teachers and parents in the transition from primary to lower secondary school in the context of cantonal selection quotas [40,41]. Formal accounts, such as test scores and grades, and collective accounts of shared patterns of justification seem to be crucial, and institutionalized practices and routines seem to prevent parents from refusing to consent. To study educational transitions from a governance perspective, quota regulations, selection instruments, and actors’ justifications must all be taken into account
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