404 EMMANUEL DROIT AND WILFRIED RUDLOFF
ployment systems.^39 In the GDR, however, the proportions between the
qualifi cation levels for both the educational and the employment systems
remained frozen at the point they had reached in the early 1980s; the
supply and demand in terms of qualifi cations was offi cially stabilized and
balanced out through the state-run educational and employment plan-
ning agendas. Nonetheless, discrepancies between job classifi cations and
the actual demands of a job were still quite prevalent.^40 This often meant
that people were working in jobs that were below their qualifi cations. Ac-
cordingly, the tight formal link between education and employment was
accompanied by an informal disassociation.
Equal Opportunity
Education policy sometimes took on the function of social policy in both
German states, although at diff erent points in time in each country. In its
early phase, East German educational policy was clearly seen as a way to
redistribute educational opportunities within society. Within the context
of a conscious attempt to replace the old elites with loyal socialist cadres
and in response to the massive migration to the West that took place be-
fore the Wall went up, the “children of workers and farmers” were able to
compensate for the educational defi cits associated with their social back-
ground by demonstrating their loyalty to the new system.^41 As the SED
dictatorship was becoming established, the “bourgeois monopoly on ed-
ucation” was broken through eff orts such as the creation of “worker and
farmer” faculties and positive discrimination policies in upper secondary
schools.^42 At the universities, the social composition of the faculty as well
as the student body had lost its “bourgeois” character, a process that
picked up pace in the late 1960s alongside a generational shift. Accord-
ing to offi cial statistics, the “children of workers” accounted for 52.7 per-
cent of the students studying at East German universities in 1958.^43 Even
though the category of “workers” was very broadly defi ned to include the
children of salaried employees and of parents who worked for the security
forces or held party offi ces, this fi gure nonetheless indicates that the GDR
was moving closer toward its goal of “proportional equal opportunity.”
The idea was that the ratio of educational participation among the social
classes should correspond to their respective percentages of the popu-
lation.^44 By the late 1960s, children of production workers accounted for
almost 60 percent of the students enrolled in the section on philosophy
and scientifi c socialism at the Karl-Marx-Universität in Leipzig.^45
Compared to the GDR and other Western European states, the unequal
distribution of educational opportunities was addressed a bit later in