Corporatist Governance in Higher Education? A Comparison of Work-Based Higher Education Programs in Germany and the United States

Employers are increasingly struggling to recruit talented young people for traditional work-based training programs, not least due to the global expansion of academic education. The paper analyses and compares employer strategies in Germany and the United States in the face of this rapid socio-economic change and finds an increasing role for work-based higher education in both countries. The political economy literature traditionally distinguishes between collectively governed dual apprenticeships in Germany and more strongly market-driven on-the-job training in the United States. However, this classification does not adequately account for the growing importance of work-based study programs within both the German and U.S.-American higher education systems. The paper proposes a conceptualization of these strongly practice-oriented higher education programs and finds significant similarities in their respective governance modes. Based on systematic process tracing, the paper looks at the role of the involved corporatist actors – especially of employers as gate keepers to work-based higher education – and provides an explanation for this partial convergence between the two countries.