Dr. Nicolai Netz

While large and highly societally relevant, the group of doctoral students still plays a subordinate role in the well-being literature. To narrow this research gap, we investigate how their life satisfaction (LS) trajectories developed throughout the Covid-19 pandemic in Germany. We draw on set-point, adaptation, family, and gender theories to examine doctoral students’ LS trajectories before, at the onset of, during, and after the pandemic. Thereby, we consider not only shorter-term but also longer-term consequences of the pandemic.

This systematic literature review sheds light on social inequalities in students’ access to and experiences of international student mobility (ISM) in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Following a scoping approach based on the 2020 PRISMA guidelines, it synthesises 48 empirical studies published in the most intense phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, namely between January 2020 and June 2022.

The paper cluster comprises four systematic reviews assessing the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on (1) macro-level flows of internationally mobile students, (2) social inequalities in access to, during, and in the wake of study abroad periods, (3) the social and cultural integration of international students, and (4) labour market expectations and experiences of internationally mobile students. Taken together, these reviews provide a comprehensive overview of the state of global research on how the pandemic has influenced several key aspects of ISM, simultaneously highlighting significant heterogeneities in terms of its impact on the different actors involved in ISM, including students, higher education institutions, and governments.

Place is an important factor influencing international student mobility (ISM). However, few studies have comprehensively examined the role of place in ISM. This special issue intends to narrow this gap by considering the role of place in ISM from different perspectives. The articles contributing to the special issue discuss three dimensions of place, namely the physical characteristics of place, the meanings and valuations of place, and social inequalities associated with place. The special issue highlights several theoretical, methodological, and empirical avenues to further advance research on the role of place in ISM.

We contribute to research on social inequalities in educational attainment by examining the role of institutional contexts for students’ study abroad (SA) intent and participation. To do so, we extend the individual-level rational choice model predicting SA intent and participation depending on students’ socioeconomic status (SES) into a multi-level model emphasizing the importance of context effects. We test our model based on unique micro-level student data, which we supplement with context data. Examining 18,510 students nested in 69 universities, we provide the first in-depth multi-level analyses of SA intent and participation of students from Japan.

We examine the mechanisms explaining the dropout intentions of students with disabilities by integrating Tinto’s model of student integration, the student attrition model, the composite persistence model, and insights from social stratification research. Overall, our results highlight the importance of considering both students’ integration into higher education and their private resources for understanding student-group-specific dropout intent.

Early-life environments can have long-lasting effects on individuals’ later life courses. Interestingly, research on the effects of school reforms has hardly adopted this perspective. Therefore, we investigate a staggered school reform that reduced the number of school years and increased weekly instructional time for secondary school students in most German federal states. We analyze this quasi-experiment in a difference-in-differences framework using nationally representative large-scale survey data on 69,513 students who attended university between 1998 and 2016. Using both TWFE and weighted-group ATT estimators, we find negative effects of reform exposure on hours spent attending classes and on self-study.

While recent research has investigated what signals of academic performance govern academics’ access to professorships, whether the power of such signals varies across disciplines has to date hardly been examined. We argue that the signaling power of academic achievements depends on the discipline-specific degree of standardization of research and on the spatio-temporal universality of research objects. Using a factorial survey experiment with Germany-based university professors of German studies, selected social sciences, and chemistry, we investigate the suitability of fictitious candidates for a tenured professorship (N respondents = 874, N vignettes = 6354).