402 EMMANUEL DROIT AND WILFRIED RUDLOFF
ers in the 1960s, the sinking birthrate in the 1970s further exacerbated
the drop in demand for teachers that followed once the baby boomers
graduated. Nonetheless, at the end of the 1970s, a fi fth of unemployed
academics were engineers, but this percentage dropped considerably in
the 1980s.^30
Once the federal government changed hands in 1982, the Ministry for
Education and Science tried to put the brakes on the rush to the academic
professions by redirecting the focus toward vocational training and ed-
ucation. In contrast to the GDR, the West German state could use only
“soft” steering instruments, such as the numerus clausus, providing in-
suffi cient funds to the universities, or off ering vocational counseling, etc.
The restructuring of the student loan program, known as Bafög, in 1982,
which required full repayment of the amounts awarded, combined with
the rising job risks for university graduates, led to tendencies of social
closure at the universities.^31 Unlike in the GDR, however, the absolute
number of university students in West Germany continued to rise. The age
cohorts with higher birth rates had reached university age. In expectation
that the number of students would decline afterward, the “opening reso-
lution” of the minister-president of the universities in 1977 had allowed
for a temporary “overload” until, as was assumed, the “pile of students”
would “tunnel out at the bottom” when the cohorts with lower birth rates
reached the universities. The image of a “doubled bottleneck,” which had
been circulating in the second half of the 1970s, refl ected the two-edged
problem that the job market could not absorb the growing number of
graduates, just as the universities could not deal with the ongoing mass
rush to enroll.^32 The conditions for studying at the universities worsened,
not least because they had not been able to fully adjust their capacities
to deal with mass enrollment earlier. It was not until the end of the 1980s
that the federal and state governments responded to the lack of necessary
funding for the West German universities with joint “special university
programs.” In the GDR, on the other hand, the student-teacher ratio im-
proved at the universities thanks to a considerable increase in teaching
positions despite the stable level of students. Since the degree programs
themselves were more strictly organized than in West Germany, students
took less time to complete their degrees, and they did not change majors
as often; there were also fewer dropouts. As a result, the diff erence in the
number of graduates between East and West Germany universities in the
1980s was much less than that between the total numbers of students.^33
As calculations have shown, the higher quotas for admission and enroll-
ment in West Germany compared to the GDR from the 1970s onward
were leveled out to some degree by the high number of dropouts and
incomplete degrees at West German universities.^34