The state has been financing further training for working people for 25 years. This currently costs 512 million per year. And there is criticism of its usefulness.
“Then I’m leaving!” – a sentence full of expectation and zest for life. Not just for classic dropouts. Educational leave has existed for working people for 25 years. Purpose: Additional qualifications for the position. Especially for poorly educated, low-skilled workers with correspondingly low incomes. Now it turns out: the well-intentioned model was – to put it politely – not brought to life in the way the inventor intended.
“On costs to the public”
“It is not mainly the poorly qualified who learn new skills with government support to increase their market value. These are mainly those who have already received a good education. Quite a few apparently see this as an opportunity to take a sabbatical at the expense of the general public,” says economist Carmen Treml of Agenda Austria.
The economically liberal think tank has looked at developments over the past quarter century. Educational leave is becoming increasingly popular – and increasingly expensive. Since 2020 alone, costs have almost doubled: including social security contributions, state expenditure in 2023 amounted to 512.1 million euros. In 2019 this was 213.6 million euros. This corresponds to an increase of 140 (!) percent in this short period. And especially better educated people.
Only 2,500 of the 22,000 recipients have only a compulsory school diploma. However, about a quarter are unsure what type of training they have completed.
“AMS’s hands are tied here”
In principle, all options that are in any way relevant to your career are considered training or further education. “That’s broad. And leave a lot of room for the companies that have to approve parental leave. The hands of the AMS are more or less tied here,” says Carmen Treml. To get rejected, you would have to take diving courses for journalists in the Seychelles or yoga courses for programmers in New Zealand.
In fact, in 2022, despite numerous objections, only two percent of applications submitted to the AMS were actually rejected. At least 20 hours per week must be spent on additional training (16 hours for children requiring care). Only a quarter of this should be spent on training facilities.
Trend towards extension of the “baby break”
Another development: most recipients are women; until 2018, men were comparable. And there is a trend towards extending the “baby break”. In 2021, the share of women who extended their educational leave was almost 70 percent.
The educational leave also shows that companies ‘save at the expense of the AMS’ in difficult economic times.
In view of this cost spiral, Agenda Austria recommends a reform of educational leave. Minister of Economic Affairs and Labor Martin Kocher has already thought about this. After all, it concerns about half a billion in taxpayers’ money, which is distributed more or less sensibly here.
Source: Krone
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
