Business-Government Cooperation in Vet: A Russian Experiment with Dual Education

Upgrading vocational education and training (VET) has become an increasingly urgent task for societies facing the challenges of rapid technological change and globalization. Today governments in many countries, including the United States, Russia and China, are seeking to adopt elements of the German dual education model. However, implementing dual education is institutionally demanding because of the multiple collective dilemmas inherent in coordinating VET with the labor market. The Russian federal government has undertaken several initiatives designed to upgrade the quality of VET by encouraging close cooperation of vocational schools and firms at the regional level. This paper focuses on a 2013 project administered by the Russian Agency for Strategic Initiatives (ASI), which ran a competition to select regions as pilot regions for the development of new models of dual education. The paper compares the 13 pilot regions with regions that submitted proposals but were not selected and with and all other regions along multiple economic, social, demographic and institutional dimensions. The findings suggest hypotheses about the conditions that enabled the pilot regions to take advantage of federal policies encouraging the adoption of dual education.