400 EMMANUEL DROIT AND WILFRIED RUDLOFF
dynamic of expansion in the West stood in contrast to the educational
participation rates that had largely been frozen in place by the state in the
East. Participation in education was subordinated to the imperatives of
centralized planning, for which the major determinant was a largely sta-
ble qualifi cation demand. Since individual educational needs no longer
seemed to mesh with the labor needs of the economy, access to the upper
secondary school levels (namely grades eleven and twelve, referred to as
Erweiterte Oberschule, which came after the ten-year mandatory period of
schooling as preparation for the Abitur), as well as to university studies,
was restricted, eff ectively putting the brakes on educational expansion.
This kind of steering of the system from above in order to meet cen-
tral planning needs was not at all compatible with the prevailing notions
of state and sociopolitical order in West Germany. In 1972, in a case
that came before the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional
Court) on the numerus clausus (which regulated university admission re-
quirements), the court declared that capping the capacity of the univer-
sities merely on the basis of demand considerations was not permissible.
The court cited Article 12, Paragraph 1 of the Grundgesetz, which reads,
“All Germans shall have the right freely to choose their occupation or pro-
fession, their place of work and their place of training,” as the basis for
its decision.^21 Additionally, the West German educational planners had
acquired little faith in the forecasting capabilities of the economists of
education, at least with regard to those branches of the occupational sys-
tem in which manpower requirements were governed by highly complex
market processes. The West German planners therefore opted to rely on
fl exible adaption and adjustment processes on the job market. Thus it
was assumed that the existing stock of qualifi cations would generate the
corresponding demand on the labor market through mobility processes
that crossed professional boundaries and created new labor market seg-
ments for people with these qualifi cations.^22 The goal of the planners in
the GDR, on the other hand, was to eliminate these kinds of ambiguities
and uncertainties when it came to the coordination of the educational and
employment systems as much as possible.
In the planned economy of the GDR, discrepancies between the supply
of educational qualifi cations and the demand for qualifi ed labor could not
be treated primarily as a problem of the individuals on the labor markets,
as it was the case in market societies. Rather, these discrepancies indi-
cated problems within the planning system itself. By backpedaling on
educational expansion in order to avoid such disproportions, the SED in
fact increasingly repudiated the individual educational expectations of
families who, bit by bit, had begun to push their children toward the Abi-
tur and university studies. In 1971, 11 percent of an age cohort attended