Publications

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, contact, education, and employment opportunities have fundamentally changed worldwide. However, various studies have pointed out that not everyone is equally affected by the changed circumstances. This paper focuses on the impact of the pandemic on the study situation in German higher education and explores the question to what extent the pandemic has led to increasing or decreasing social inequalities. Building on social stratification research and Tinto’s model of social and academic integration we focus on dropout intentions of traditionally disadvantaged student groups – students with disabilities, with children, from families with lower levels of education, and with a migrant background. (...)

The German initiative of excellence was the most far-reaching political measure in university funding–a shift from an equal distribution of funds, rooted in Humboldt’s tradition, to large-scale merit-based funding. Recent studies have examined the question how the initiative has affected (in)equality in university funding; but as yet little is known about effects on graduates’ monetary returns for university degrees. We analyse whether a degree from a ‘university of excellence’ leads to a wage premium at labour market entry. Inspired by previous work that found advantages only for subgroups, we further analyse whether the excellence effect on wages differs by social background and gender.

Integrating research on school-to-work transitions, international migration, and social inequality, this article investigates the social stratification of international school-to-work transitions and their payoff. Existing research shows that spatial mobility can amplify social inequalities both through social selectivity in access to mobility and through heterogeneity in its labor market outcomes. Building on these findings, we investigate the social selectivity of international school-to-work transitions (ISWT) and the wage difference between ISWT and national school-to-work transitions (NSWT) among graduates from higher education institutions in Germany.

Recently, an increasing number of students from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds (SRABs) entering universities in settlement countries such as Australia and Germany have necessitated the establishment of a variety of supports. However, to date, little attention has been paid to the organisational conditions surrounding such supports. This study thus examined these conditions through the conceptual lens of organisational memory loss. Based on the two illustrative cases of Australia and Germany, it was described how building durable and responsive supports for SRABs is undermined by structural, ideological, and temporal imperatives that erode the possibilities for a sharable organisational memory.

Studierende mit Beeinträchtigung stehen im Studium oft vor besonderen Herausforderungen. Im Zuge der Corona-Pandemie haben sich ihre Studienbedingungen nochmals erschwert. Welche Auswirkungen hatte das auf das Abbruchrisiko dieser Studierendengruppe?

The EUROSTUDENT project collects and analyses comparable data on the social dimension of European higher education. A wide range of topics related to students’ social and economic conditions are covered. The project strives to provide reliable and insightful cross-country comparisons. It does this through coupling a central coordination approach with a strong network of national partners in each participating country. In this way, an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the respective national frameworks in international comparison can be made. The main users of our findings are higher education policy-makers at national and European level, [...] Full abstract: https://doi.org/10.21249/DZHW:es7:2.0.0

The DZHW-Panel Study of School Leavers 2018 is part of the DZHW-Panel Study of School Leavers survey series, in which standardized multiple surveys are used to collect information on the post-school careers of school leavers with a (school) higher education entrance qualification. As a rule, several survey waves are conducted at different times before and after the acquisition of the higher education entrance qualification. Accordingly, this is a combined cohort-panel design. The panel 2018 is the 21st cohort of the survey series of which the data of the first survey wave will be published first. [...] Full abstract: https://doi.org/10.21249/DZHW:gsl2018:1.0.0