Publications

Studying abroad can positively influence students’ personality development, transversal skills, and labour market outcomes. At the same time, students from a high social origin are more likely to study abroad than students from a low social origin. Against this background, recent research has suggested that international student mobility (ISM) may foster the reproduction of social inequality. However, this assumption has hardly been tested empirically. Drawing on social stratification theory, we first demonstrate that a scenario in which ISM increases social inequality (cumulative advantage) is as plausible as a scenario in which it decreases social inequality (compensatory levelling).

This editorial to the special issue on heterogeneous effects of studying abroad starts with a review of studies on the determinants and individual-level effects of studying abroad. On that basis, it illustrates the necessity to place more emphasis on effect heterogeneity in research on international student mobility. It then develops a typology of heterogeneous effects of studying abroad, which shall function as an agenda for future research in the field. Thereafter, the editorial introduces the contributions to the special issue. It concludes by summarising major findings and directions for future research.

In this article, we review quantitative studies that empirically examine whether studying abroad influences graduates’ wages. Our review suggests that studying abroad has a moderate positive effect on graduates’ early-career wages in various national and institutional settings. However, this effect tends to vary across groups of graduates, employment contexts, and types of stays abroad. Employer change, access to large and multinational companies, and access to high-wage labor markets abroad appear to be the most relevant mechanisms mediating the effect of studying abroad on wages. Other mechanisms, such as improved language skills and a greater tendency to pursue further education, turn out to be less relevant.

This paper studies the evolution of three higher education wage differentials from 1996 to 2019 in Germany, a period when significant changes in the educational composition of the workforce took place. Based on regression analysis and samples of male and female workers from the Socio-Economic Panel Study, the study finds that while all three educational wage differentials increased, workers graduating from universities experienced an inverted u-shape pattern, reaching a plateau between 2011 and 2015. We argue that the decline which began after 2015, and which is detectable as well in the occupational prestige scores, may have resulted from a relative educational upskilling of the workforce as well as changes in the subject composition.

Since more qualified refugees have been looking for protection and prospects in Germany, the demand for pre-study programs has remained high. The WeGe project (Refugees’ Pathways to German Higher Education Institutions) examines the conditions for successful study preparation of refugees and uses a mixed-methods research design. As a conceptual framework, the Capabilities Approach (CA) serves both as a basis for a definition of success and for the analysis of requirements for successful study preparation on an institutional, social and individual level. It turns out that the vast majority of refugees successfully complete their pre-study programs. However, transitions to higher education depend on institutional barriers, which manifest them