Publications

The Social Survey is a series of surveys on the economic and social situation of students in Germany that has been in existence since 1951. At three- to four-year intervals, a cross-section of students is surveyed on aspects of university access, structural features of study, social and economic situation, including income and cost of living, employment, housing situation, and socio-demographic characteristics such as ethnic and social origin, partnership status and parenthood. The data package includes data from the survey of German, educationally native, and educationally foreign students conducted as part of the 15th Social Survey (1997). https://doi.org/10.21249/DZHW:ssy15:1.0.0

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 subject of this study is the analysis of the websites of 20 U.S. universities that contain information and support services to enable accessible, digital teaching. The goal of the analysis is first of all a detailed description of the content of these information portals, which focuses in particular on the aspects of organizational anchoring, addressee orientation, and content design, as well as on identifying good practice. The findings are then discussed with a view to their possible transferability to the German higher education system. If a transfer to the German higher education system makes sense and is possible, corresponding recommendations will be formulated.