Articles

The article focuses on students with health impairments that have adverse effects on their studies, within the German higher education system. Using data from “The student survey in Germany: best: Studying with health impairments” we present current results on the composition of this group, on their drop-out intention and experienced discrimination during their studies. There exist notable differences within this group according to the type and severity of impairment.

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.

This work proposes using the feature of large language models (LLMs) to learn about the "data bias" injected by diverse SDG classifications into bibliometric data by exploring five SDGs. We build a LLM that is fine-tuned in parallel by the diverse SDG classifications inscribed into the databases' SDG classifications. Our results show high sensitivity in model architecture, classified publications, fine-tuning process and natural language generation. The wide arbitrariness at different levels raises concerns about using LLM in research practice.

In the Dutch academic system, PhD theses can be awarded with cum laude and at most 5% of all PhD graduates receive this selective distinction for their thesis. In this paper, we investigate whether there is gender bias in awarding cum laude, using data from one of the major Dutch research universities. A main result is that the set of PhD theses receiving cum laude on average do not have a higher quality than the best theses not getting cum laude. A second main result is that, after controlling for the quality of the PhD theses, women still have a substantially lower probability to receive cum laude. These results strongly suggest that the distribution of awards suffers from gender bias.