Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 4, 1993 TAG: 9307040029
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: B6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: HILLEROD, DENMARK LENGTH: Long
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.
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.
In the United States, reformers must cope with union rules, teacher training requirements and rivalries between high schools and community colleges.
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 percent of Germans have received on-the-job training by the time they reach 25, compared with 3 percent of American men and less than 1 percent of American women.
It's no coincidence, Lynch said, that worker productivity has increased more slowly in the United States (0.7 percent a year from 1979 to 1991) than in Germany (1.4 percent), Denmark (2.3 percent) 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.
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.
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.
by CNB