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14. Mai 2014

BeNA - Seminar für Arbeitsmarktforschung

Selecting the selected? A sibling-analysis on tertiary education transition in Germany

Termin

14. Mai 2014
18:15 - 19:30

Ort

WZB - Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
Reichpietschufer 50
10785 Berlin

Sprecher*innen

Tamás Keller (TARKI Budapest)
Abstract: Past studies show, that early educational tracking strengthens the persistence of economic outcomes from parents to children. In the case of Germany, this could be one of the reasons for the experienced low educational mobility. This being said, an interesting question which has been analysed in fewer studies so far, deals with the transition to tertiary education. Do all pupils who reach the highest secondary school track face the same opportunities to go to the university? And how strong is the parental background effect, which already decides majorly about the selection into secondary school, also in the mechanism of selection into tertiary education? We address this question through a multilevel analysis focusing on sibling correlations in cognitive and non-cognitive abilities. The data we use derives from German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP) and has the great advantage that we can follow pupils who participated in the survey at the age of 17 later in life. Thus, we have informations about their notes and subjective perceptions about future success when they were still in school, and informations about the tertiary education path (University, vocational school or others) they pursued thereafter. Our results are twofold, showing on the one hand, that only the family average in notes and not the individual deviation from it have a significant effect on the probability to go to university. This points at a strong influence of parental background also at transition to tertiary education. On the other hand, subjective perceptions show to have an individual effect which holds also controlling for family effects. This final result gives a hopeful scenario for policy makers and opens interesting opportunities for further research.
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