Development of higher education and employment in the Federal Republic of Germany
In the Federal Republic of Germany — as in many other industrialized countries higher education has, under the influence of social, economic and political forces, developed from a relatively small, selective and elite-oriented to a large system of mass education. The increasing number of students and university teachers, and the expansion of scientific and technological methods and knowledge has brought about claims for genuine organizational transformations and for massive financial resources. This development has created a number of severe problems in the relationship of the respective socio-economic and political sub-systems; in particular, the relationship between higher education and the labour market has to be considered as a vital but unresolved problem.This article gives a short account of the quantitative development of the German universities and the labour market in the last two decades. It also describes the organizational transformations which followed the federal framework law on higher education (Hochschulrahmengesetz) of January 1976, and deals with some aspects of research in relation to such problems.