EDUCATIONAL RIVALRIES 403
An often forgotten aspect of this growth in education that appeared
alongside the expansion of the universities and higher educational quali-
fi cations was the decrease in the percentage of young people who left the
educational system without having completed their leaving certifi cates
for school or vocational training. There were, of course, clear diff erences
between East and West Germany here as well. At the beginning of the
1970s, almost everyone who left the POS and did not enroll in a further
secondary school institution began an apprenticeship (even if it was only
partial vocational training for the very few who dropped out early without
a leaving certifi cate); in the 1980s, this still amounted to three-quarters of
the youth in the GDR.^35 In terms of the overall level of qualifi cation among
employed individuals, the greatest diff erence between the two societies
could be found at the very bottom level. Whereas only 13 percent of all
employed individuals in the GDR had not completed formal vocational
training of some kind in 1988, this fi gure was still almost a quarter in the
FRG.^36 Likewise, in the mid-1980s, less than 2 percent of those who left
the POS had not attained a leaving certifi cate of some kind in the GDR.^37
In West Germany, however, 7 percent of those who dropped out of the
general education schools never fi nished any formal training or schooling
at the beginning of the 1980s. Yet the weaker performance in the West
also had something to do with the growing problem of trying to inte-
grate pupils whose families had come from foreign countries; a third of
these pupils left school without completing their diplomas in 1983.^38 The
schools in the GDR were not confronted with the question of how to inte-
grate the children of immigrants, especially because there were no such
children. In sum, although West Germany had taken the lead over the
GDR in the production of higher-qualifi ed graduates, the East German
educational and training system was ahead of the West when it came to
reducing the number of people at the bottom of the qualifi cations scale.
In West Germany, one consequence of the growth of the educational
system that began to become more apparent was the cascade-like pro-
cess of crowding out that took place on the job market. Highly qualifi ed
individuals were pushing less-qualifi ed individuals out of the running for
jobs that they used to be able to get. Educational expansion therefore
eliminated some older educational hurdles, but it also created new ones.
The job market proved to be more able to take on the growing number
of highly skilled and better qualifi ed individuals than had often been as-
sumed, and the sustained growth of the service sector benefi ted univer-
sity graduates in particular. Yet, at the same time, the transformation of
occupational structures lagged behind the dynamic of educational expan-
sion, and the competition among applicants on the job market continued
to be stiff up and down the ladder of the vocational training and em-