People always say these schools are “looked down on” and rightly so they are mostly scams. Virtually all tradespeople like this have relatives in that trade. The idea these school would actually be equivalent to a college is laughable.
And issue with them is not the school itself, but the type of teenagers that attend them. As much as it pains me, for zawodówka schools - you will get the most demotivated people. And even if you really just want to be trained, you will get into an environment that will destroy you.
I wonder how Germans are faring with this.
There are also Technische Universitäten (Technical University) which are "proper" universities with the ability to grant doctorates and the ability to become professor.
So Fachhochschulen are a separate thing from both Berufsschule (vocational school) and universities.
I was thinking of high school, not uni itself. I'm myself also from a technical university equivalent in Poland.
Today, there’s a shortage of labor in all of the skilled trades, so the unions have taken it on themselves to provide the trade school education concurrently with the apprenticeship. In the electrical union (IBEW), apprentices go to school one day a week for twenty weeks a year, for five years. Pipefitters, sheet metal workers, and plumbers have similar programs. This benefits both the apprentice, who doesn’t get paid to go to school by the union but they also don’t have to pay for their education, and the union, which is able to filter and train candidates directly instead of relying on a third party to do it.
I’m an electrical project manager who has never been an electrician and I never went to trade school so it’s definitely possible to work in the industry without any formal training, but I’m definitely the exception at my employer.