Saving money in vocational education costs billions of euros

Approximately 150,000 young people start their careers without any kind of training qualification every year. If Germany succeeded in halving this number, approximately 1.5 billion euros could be saved per age cohort regarding follow-up costs, which result from higher social security spending as well as smaller tax revenues and unemployment insurance contributions.

This is based on the assumption that the lack of training qualifications leads to a lower income and also increases the risk of unemployment. In Germany, seven million people between 25 and 64 years of age have no vocational training degree.

These are the results of a survey carried out by the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) and published by the Bertelsmann Foundation.