EDUCATIONAL RIVALRIES 401
the Erweiterte Oberschule (EOS), which climbed to 17 in 1973, but then
fell to 9 percent in 1975 and 8 percent in 1980.^23 On average only two to
three pupils in each tenth grade class were selected to go on to the EOS.
This intensifi ed the competition for these spots considerably, especially
since the selection was often made according to political criteria. Some
pupils actually committed to becoming professional soldiers in order to
be able to enroll in the EOS, regardless of how well they had performed
at school in the past.
At about the same time that the GDR considerably restricted access to
the universities and reined in the “emission” of university graduates, a
new debate emerged in West Germany. Although this discussion in the
Federal Republic arose within a fundamentally diff erent context, here,
too, the question was whether and how to better correlate the number and
type of qualifi cation profi les emerging from the educational system with
the needs of the occupational system.^24 Whereas West German educa-
tional policymakers had complained of the lack of graduates with higher
qualifi cations in the 1960s, this mismatch between the educational and
employment systems now seemed to have fl ipped. Within a comparative
perspective, East and West seemed to be moving in opposite directions
again. While the GDR tried to tighten the link between its educational and
employment systems, one of the major sources of debate on educational
policy in the West was actually whether the two systems were increas-
ingly disassociating themselves from one another. As early as 1972, the
frightful notion of the “academic proletariat”^25 appeared in West German
education debates, and by the middle of this decade, more and more
voices were warning of a sharp rise in unemployment among academ-
ics. At the political level, the Christian Democratic Union applauded the
criticism directed at the continual expansion of educational participation,
calling for less focus on academic educational tracks and more emphasis
on vocational education.
In the 1980s, however, it became apparent that the “proletarianization
theory” had not played out as many had predicted because mass unem-
ployment among academics had never reached such a threatening level
as had once been feared.^26 Just as always, job security continued to in-
crease with each additional level of education.^27 Within the diff erent eco-
nomic sectors, however, there were considerable imbalances: the more
university graduates were dependent on employment in civil service, the
more their risk of unemployment. The percentage of university graduates
employed in the civil service shrank in the 1970s, from about 68 percent
in 1971 to just 26 percent in 1978.^28 In particular, this decline was the
result of the shrinking employment chances that aff ected aspiring teach-
ers.^29 Whereas the baby boomers had created a dire need for more teach-