The European Educational Model and its Paradoxical Impact at the National Level

The Bologna and Copenhagen processes promote standards for the categorization of educational programs and qualifications throughout Europe – with the goal to create greater transparency and permeability in European skill formation. However, key tools of Europeanization, like the Bachelor and Master degree cycles and the European Qualification Framework, fail to acknowledge important cultural, normative, and regulative idiosyncrasies of the educational systems in Austria and Germany. In both countries the sectors of vocational training and academic education represent distinct organizational fields divided by an "educational schism". The tensions and contradictions that accompany this traditional institutional divide have in many cases been masked by patterns of loose coupling. However, the current Europeanization processes tend to unsettle these patterns, which unleashes conflicts between the actors of the respective organizational fields, for example, with regard to the placement of the different certificates in the common qualification framework. The outcome of these struggles often is that the institutional divide between vocational training and academic education is widening rather than narrowing. The chapter shows how the Austrian and German institutional heritage has diverted the European educational model's initial goal to foster permeability and, with that, illustrates this model's paradoxical impact at the national level.