Publications

The 17th Social Survey is part of the series of studies on the economic and social condition of student life in Germany, which exists since 1951. It is a cross-sectional survey that is usually conducted every three years. The core of the Social Survey includes questions on access to higher education, structural characteristics of studies and the course of studies, the social and economic situation (financing of studies, cost of living, gainful employment, housing situation), topics relating to the fields of activity of the Studentenwerke as well as socio-demographic characteristics. https://doi.org/10.21249/DZHW:ssy17:2.0.0

This Intelligence Brief takes a closer look at students’ health. Compared to the overall population of the same age, students less often perceive their health as good or very good. Logistic regression analyses with German student data show strong and negative relations between financial difficulties and students’ health perception. Additionally, a cross-country comparison with EUROSTUDENT data consistently shows comparatively large shares of impaired students among those with financial difficulties. The findings indicate that policy makers should pay special attention to both impaired and financially challenged students in order to ensure their successful higher education participation and prevent negative societal effects of poor health.

We conduct an independent cluster validation study on published clustering solutions of a research testbed corpus, the Astro dataset of publication records from astronomy and astrophysics. We extend the dataset by collecting external validation data serving as proxies for the latent structure of the corpus. Specifically, we collect (1) grant funding information related to the publications, (2) data on topical special issues, (3) on specific journals’ internal topic classifications and (4) usage data from the main online bibliographic database of the discipline. The latter three types of data are newly introduced for the purpose of clustering validation and the rationale for using them for this task is set out.

This publication presents indicators on the social dimension of higher education in the European Higher Education Area in four key areas: Demographics and social background of students, transition and access into higher education, students’ employment, and the financial situation of students. To what extent can students of different backgrounds be found within the higher education systems? How open and flexible are European higher education systems in providing access to students entering higher education at different points in their lives, and with different past experiences? What are the circumstances under which students pursue their studies and how do they make a living?

As entry rates in German higher education have grown considerably, student diversity is of particular concern for educational politics. To shed light on the role of diversity for study success, the paper first focuses on a broad range of social, individual, and organizational diversity factors. Furthermore, study success is investigated in terms of how challenging students perceive the formal and informal requirements of the first year in higher education. Drawing on a student survey conducted after the first year of studies, the study then uses multiple linear regression analysis to examine the relationship of diversity and the perception of requirements.