@kaia @xarvos I personally did an Ausbildung before going to Uni. Most Abitur(high-school)-schools don't advertise trade-jobs, mine was one of the few that did. I'm now struggling with my bachelor's thesis since academic writing never came up in 3 years of Uni and now feels like an arbitrary requirement of a capstone.

In general I feel that trade-school is better for industry work ten-fold, since fresh uni graduates tend to not have any practical experience and need to be taught by the employer. Unfortunately Uni is still seen as categorically higher in social status and is slowly becoming the default path for anyone who can reach Abitur.

With people struggling in academics and tradecraft having less and less new people picking up jobs, this will backfire at some point. I liked the diploma-path as a non-academic equal status alternative with practical focus. Sad that got axed.

Politically speaking, turning more jobs into academic degrees was meant to increase their social value and standardize them internationally. Some countries have now moved on to a sort of "Fachbachelor", that gets to skip the paper-writing academic parts in favour of practical works and exams similar to diplomas. As always Germany tries to copy the good things from other places, yet moves so slowly that they lag behind, ending up in the beta-state while the kinks already got ironed-out everywhere else.

Sorry for the rant, I just can't help having strong opinions on the topic.