Publications

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

The DZHW-Panel Study of School Leavers 2012 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 for each year group of persons with a university entrance qualification. Accordingly, this is a combined cohort-panel design. The panel 2012 is the 19th cohort of the study series with currently two waves. [...] Full abstract: https://doi.org/10.21249/DZHW:gsl2012:2.0.0

The EUROSTUDENT VII – Synopsis of Indicators is the central publication of the EUROSTUDENT project and the result of the collaboration of a European-wide network. It comprises data from student surveys conducted in 25 countries in the European Higher Education Area during the seventh round of the EUROSTUDENT project. Adopting a broad, comparative perspective, the EUROSTUDENT VII – Synopsis of Indicators provides information on students’ socio-economic and study-related backgrounds, their study conditions and experiences, including international mobility, and their living conditions. It aims to inspire policy debates on the topic of the social dimension and lay the ground for further research.

Starting from the observation that questionnaires for appropriately measuring the changing working conditions and requirements of the highly qualified workforce do not exist, we developed a new German-language instrument focussing on knowledge work. Based on theoretical considerations, we first identified three basic dimensions that constitute knowledge work: novelty, complexity, and autonomy. During the subsequent process of questionnaire development with higher education graduates, including a cognitive pretest, a quantitative development study, and a replication study, these dimensions were operationalised by initially 173 and finally 22 items.