Publications

Recent evidence suggests that women are more likely to be selected for professorships when they apply. This female advantage may be partly due to the widely promoted gender-equality policy of having a substantial female quota in selection committees. Yet, research has rarely considered whether male and female committee members evaluate applicants for professorships differently. We address this research gap based on a large factorial survey experiment with German university professors from different disciplines. We asked these professors to rate how qualified hypothetical applicants are for full professorships and the likelihood of inviting these applicants for a job interview.

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