
Raffaella Simona Esposito (2025)
Social Inclusion, Vol. 13, Open access
Abstract. In Switzerland, four different educational pathways lead to higher education (HE): baccalaureate schools, upper‐secondary specialized middle schools, vocational middle schools, and dual vocational education and training (VET) combined with a federal vocational baccalaureate. The four pathways are not equally supported by Swiss education policy: Baccalaureate schools and dual VET plus a federal vocational baccalaureate are politically treated as the two royal roads to HE, while specialized middle schools and vocational middle schools, in this study grouped under the term vocationally oriented middle schools (VOMS), receive only little political attention. This holds true even though VOMS have a high transition rate to HE and are considered to have the potential to bring young women into male‐typical HE programs and attract high‐achieving youths with a migration background. The study investigates from a governance perspective how (in practices and processes) the conception of the royal roads to HE is constructed and reproduced as well as how this affects the positioning of VOMS as pathways to HE in Switzerland. The study refers to the theoretical framework of the sociology of conventions and the concept of valuation practices. The data basis consists of publicly available documents and qualitative interviews. The findings show that commensurations, categorizations, visualizations, and the interplay between a variety of human and non‐human actors reinforce two highly stable and powerful cognitive formats of royal roads to HE. At the same time, these same practices construct an image of VOMS as less significant additional pathways to HE by rendering their qualities and potentials as such pathways comparatively invisible or tabooing them in the service of educational policy interests. With these findings, the present study contributes to the international scholarly discussion on permeability between VET and HE.
Extract: “From a functionalist perspective, society and the labor market demand a variety of educational qualifications, which in turn necessitate diverse educational programs, each with distinct characteristics. These characteristics, along with the corresponding qualifications, are assigned different meanings and values. This leads to the question of how the quality and value of educational programs are socially constructed. In contrast to the understanding of quality in common educational policy discourse (Hupka‐Brunner et al., 2015), the sociology of conventions framework (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Diaz‐Bone & de Larquier, 2022) does not view quality as something that can be determined ontologically, objectively, and universally. In this view, quality is rather the result of processes of attribution by actors on the basis of different orders of worth (quality conventions; for quality conventions in education see Imdorf & Leemann, 2023). Eymard‐Duvernay (2012a) has called this process of attribution “valuation.” In this context, Favereau (2017) emphasized that quality is the product not only of valuation processes but of devaluation processes as well.” (p. 7)