Hardly any chances on the labor market: tens of thousands leave school every year without a qualification

Every year, more than 47,000 young people start their careers without having completed school.

Hardly any chances on the labor market: tens of thousands leave school every year without a qualification

Every year, more than 47,000 young people start their careers without having completed school. Unskilled workers often end up in precarious jobs and lack skilled workers. Some groups are particularly at risk of leaving school early.

In Germany, tens of thousands of young people are still finishing school without a degree - their proportion remains at a high level. This is the result of a study by education researcher Klaus Klemm on behalf of the Bertelsmann Foundation. In 2021 there were around 47,500 young people. This corresponds to a share of slightly more than six percent of all young people of the same age and has not changed since 2011. About 60 percent of this group are boys. In addition, people with foreign citizenship (13.4 percent) are affected almost three times as often as Germans of the same age (4.6 percent). Every second person without a secondary school certificate was also in a special needs school.

"Despite positive developments in individual federal states, it has not been possible to reduce the proportion of young people without a school-leaving certificate over the past ten years," said Nicole Hollenbach-Biele, education expert at the Bertelsmann Foundation. This is particularly problematic because the modern working world is making ever more complex demands, it said. Those who leave school without a degree run the risk of ending up in precarious employment. Data from the most recent vocational training report shows that young people who do not have a school-leaving certificate have hardly any chances of training.

According to this, two-thirds of young adults between the ages of 20 and 34 who do not have a school-leaving certificate also have no vocational training. This has consequences: the unemployment rate for unskilled people is almost six times higher than for people with vocational training. In Bavaria, only 5.1 percent of all young people leave school without a degree, while in Bremen it is almost twice as many at ten percent. According to the study, larger differences can also be seen over time: while the rate in Bremen, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland has risen since 2011, it has fallen in Berlin, Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt and most clearly in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

In order to give young people better prospects in the future, the Bertelsmann Foundation recommends, among other things, the best possible support for particularly weak students in the classroom. Digital applications could help to identify learning deficits at an early stage and to accompany the young people individually in their learning process. "Every young person without a school-leaving certificate is one too many," said educational researcher Klemm. Because that means significantly worse future prospects for those affected. In view of the growing shortage of skilled workers, society cannot afford to let these people fall through the cracks.