The Transition from School to Work in Crisis: Coping with Threatening Unemployment

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Abstract
As West German youth have confronted restricted opportunities for employment and training, some observers have predicted that they would become either rebellious or hopeless. A longitudinal interview study of 200 youth in Bremen, a city with a very depressed economy, reveals that they tend to accept personal responsibility for improving their prospects instead of turning against society or giving up. The subjects, students in the lowest-level secondary school (Hauptschule), remained optimistic as they sought apprenticeship places and asserted that they were obligated to obtain the highest educational levels possible and to be flexible in their career choices in order to maximize their chances of finding a training place and, ultimately, a job. Although this finding is encouraging from the perspective of maintaining social order, it is somewhat unexpected in view of the German tradition of state responsibility for maintaining low rates of unemployment. Moreover, it seems to require a form of self-deception on the young people's part. They reconstruct their biographies to convince themselves that a training place they accepted simply because it was the only one available is in a field that they always wanted to enter.

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