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

近年来，由于终身学习具有更高的政治相关性以及随之而来的能力扩展（所谓的四级教育），成人教育的重要性有所增加。到目前为止，近900个成人教育中心（VHSn）（其中10.5%位于德国东部）具有广泛的教育任务，并直接或间接地受市或不设区的县/市的控制。2016年，成人教育中心的注册人数约为660万，课程超过59万门，年教学时间超过1780万小时，是成人教育的主要支柱之一。VHSn旨在通过提供广泛的进修、再培训和新的资格以及各种文化和健康培训课程，确保向人口提供教育机会。此外，政治和社会教育发挥着核心作用：公民可以通过各种方案形式了解和促进基本或当地相关的主题。这是为了消除日益严重的政治参与疲劳。二战后，西德国的VHSn相对自由地发展，并经历了一系列的纲领性变化，而在东德，供应很快就缩小了。当东德教育系统在统一后进行重组时，VHSn面临着相当大的适应挑战。它们成为一个独立于国家教育系统的机构，其方案的方向，赞助和融资必须重新找到。在课程计划中越来越多地提供具有社会政治和科学技术内容的新课程。据我们所知，该项目旨在首次调查成人教育对劳动力市场和教育成果的因果经济影响，以及一些补充性的非金钱指标。为了确定利益的结果的因果关系的影响，我们将使用准实验的情况下，在成人教育提供在德国东部的德国统一所造成的变化（作为一个自然的实验）。由于实施方面的区域和时间差异，可以根据不同的个人参与可能性或概率来确定治疗组和对照组。将使用各种差异中的差异方法来估计影响。

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.