increasingly vocational colleges provide an important route into tertiary education one in four university students and almost one in two students at universities of applied sciences are now vocational college graduates however since the austrian vocational college programmes combine elements of upper secondary and postsecondary education they have few international parallels the new regulations permit those with an advanced vocational qualification general access to academic higher education and holders of other vocational qualifications a subjectspecific access to higher education to support those pursuing this pathway a range of measures have been piloted or rolled out nationally and initiated locally such as advancement scholarships or bilateral credit transfer systems between individual vocational colleges and universities of applied science