Analysis on the Relevance of Adult Education: Evaluation of the Economic Impacts of Adult Education Centers in East Germany after Reunification

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Stephan L. Thomsen
• Subject Area: Economic Policy, Applied Economics ; Statistics and Econometrics
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 437570974

Adult education has gained in importance in recent years due to the higher political relevance of lifelong learning and the accompanying expansion in capacities (so-called quaternary education). To date, the almost 900 adult education centers (VHSn) (10.5% of which are in eastern Germany) have a broad educational mandate and are under direct or indirect control of the municipalities or counties/cities with no district. With around 6.6 million enrolments in over 590,000 courses and over 17.8 million annual teaching hours in 2016, adult education centers constitute one of the main pillars of adult education. VHSn are intended to ensure that the population is provided with educational opportunities by offering a wide range of further education, retraining and new qualifications as well as various cultural and health training courses. In addition, political and social education plays a central role: citizens can inform themselves about and contribute to basic or locally relevant topics via various program formats. This is intended to counteract growing political participation fatigue. While the VHSn in West Germany developed relatively freely after the Second World War and underwent a series of programmatic changes, in the GDR the supply soon narrowed. When the East German education system was restructured after reunification, the VHSn faced considerable challenges to adapt. They became an institution independent of the state education system, whose programmatic orientation, sponsorship and financing had to be found anew. New courses with socio-political and scientific-technical content were increasingly offered in the course program. To the best of our knowledge, the project aims to investigate for the first time causal economic effects of adult education on labor market and educational outcomes as well as a number of supplementary non-pecuniary indicators. In order to identify the causal effects on the outcomes of interest, we will use the quasi-experimental situation of changes in adult education provision in eastern Germany caused by German reunification (as a natural experiment). Regional and temporal differences in implementation allow the definition of treatment and control groups conditional on different individual participation possibilities or probabilities. The effects will be estimated using various difference-in-difference approaches.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants