**3. Conclusions and reflections**

The analysis starts with a renewed interest in apprenticeship as a form of vocational education and training during more recent decades. The first important underlying question concerns approaches about how this form can be understood sufficiently to enact its potential for youth (and adult) education. Contrasted to a loose *modular* understanding of variants of apprenticeship practices focusing on work-based learning, more *holistic* approaches that construct complex structures of apprenticeship systems have gained influence in international or global political discourses. Such holistic approaches consist of a demanding configuration of a large set of interrelated elements concerning more basic economic, political, and

#### *Perspective Chapter: Sustaining Dual Apprenticeship Systems – Similarities and Differences... DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.112561*

social structures (including e.g., corporatist governance, well-organized industrial relations, good wages and working conditions, multi-stakeholder participation, and the like). These holistic approaches towards apprenticeship systems owe much to the existing structures in the paradigmatic trilogy of apprenticeship countries of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, that have sustained this form of vocational education and training over times of degradation and decline. Thus, a closer look at these structures and their similarities and – often neglected – differences can be justified.

The country-specific chapters in [36] have pointed to specific particularities in these countries. E.g., the tendency of firms in *Germany* to move out of the established public governance system towards Japan-like "segmentalism"; the "dualistic" structure of parallel full-time vocational schools and apprenticeship, and the situation of apprenticeship at the lowest end of the educational hierarchy in *Austria*; and the differentiation of higher level and lower-level sections of apprenticeship in *Switzerland*, implemented mainly through the creation of short 2-years programs beneath the established 3-and-4-year programs. In the current chapter, some aspects are more specifically compared, based on international comparative databases. Four research questions are explored through comparative data, first, whether the international data indicate influences of VET on the education structure through limiting participation in tertiary education or reducing exclusion towards low-level education; second, whether comparative data reinforce a reduction of youth unemployment through established apprenticeship systems; third, whether the employment relation in apprenticeship leads to a stronger involvement of labor market policy for young people; and fourth, how apprenticeship is positioned in the progression of educational pathways between upper secondary and tertiary education.

First, the educational attainment structures at lower, medium, and higher levels in the three countries are compared to international averages, in order to explore whether the apprenticeship countries show distinct attainment patterns and whether they display signs of reducing exclusion from qualified education or alternatively of withholding upgrading towards tertiary education, or both. The comparisons do neither indicate strong structural particularities nor clear structural advantages or disadvantages of the apprenticeship countries. Upgrading toward tertiary education is not withheld, and exclusion towards low-level education is not sustainably hindered. Among the three apprenticeship countries, Switzerland shows signs of both strong tertiary education and better inclusion at the low end; Austria shows signs of the most marked VET structure (strongest focus on upper secondary vocational education, less tertiary education, and less exclusion towards low-level education).

Second, a more detailed comparison of total and youth unemployment in the three countries relative to EU averages, and regional comparisons within Austria do not corroborate the common expectation that apprenticeship would relatively reduce youth unemployment. The often-cited difference between total and youth unemployment in Germany seems rather an artifact produced by the high total unemployment – youth unemployment was comparatively high in Germany compared to the other countries. Third the strong incidence of labor market policy interventions to fight problems in the youth labor market and support apprenticeship (particularly during the "great recession") in Austria cannot be found in the two other countries – so the employment relation in apprenticeship does not generally induce a higher emphasis of labor market policy towards young people – the Austrian policies are rather induced by the high political consensus about consequently fighting youth unemployment

already since the 1980s. Fourth, within the educational participation structure, Germany and Switzerland show signs of a tendency of tertiarization of apprenticeship, whereas in Austria apprenticeship seems still trapped at the lowest end of the educational hierarchy.

In sum, still, the mechanisms through which the quality apprenticeship systems gain their impact are not very well known, and the question of how much the impact of apprenticeship is driven by the component of the employment relation, as compared to the education and learning component, remains to be answered by further research. Concerning the sustainability of apprenticeship two aspects are strongly emphasized in the literature, first its positioning in relation to the tertiarization of education and meritocratic competition perceived as strong drivers of educational development ([12], and other contributions in ref. [11]), and second the establishment and maintenance of strong corporatist institutional structures of holistic quality apprenticeships [6, 7, 28] that are commonly under pressure by current neoliberal and populist policies.
