Jascha Dräger¹; Martin Neugebauer²

¹ DIW Berlin; ²  Pädagogische Hochschule Karlsruhe

Each year, over 6% of students in Germany leave school without a certificate, facing long-term disadvantages in employment, health, and well-being. This study examines whether vocational training can offset these disadvantages or whether school dropout leaves a lasting “scar.” Using SOEP data (v39), we compare adults aged 30–60 who either left school without a certificate (N = 1,037) or obtained the lowest certificate (N = 13,662). Outcomes include employment, income, health, and subjective well-being. We apply entropy balancing and mediation analysis to assess the role of vocational training. Preliminary results show that individuals with a Hauptschulabschluss are 5 percentage points more likely to be employed; about half this gap is explained by vocational training. A significant residual gap of 2.5 points remains. Differences in health and well-being are minimal. These findings suggest that vocational training partly, but not fully, compensates for early school dropout.

Sara Möser¹; Corinna Kleinert²

¹ Universität Bern; ² Leibniz-Institut für Bildungsverläufe, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg

This study examines how structural and institutional contexts shape the formation and realisation of adolescents’ occupational aspirations in Germany and Switzerland. Both countries exhibit high occupational gender segregation and traditional gender roles, yet differ in their education systems, labour markets, and family policies.

Using longitudinal data from the DAB panel (German-speaking Switzerland) and the NEPS SC4 cohort (Germany), we analyse trajectories from 9th-grade occupational aspirations to outcomes ten years later. Combining panel survey data with occupational structure data, we classify aspirations and outcomes by gender and qualification profiles.

Our analysis addresses three questions: How do occupational aspirations reflect or deviate from occupational structures and trends in educational expansion? What role do country-specific barriers and opportunities in education and labour market play in shaping aspirations? To what extent do employment outcomes align with the gender and qualification typologies of adolescents’ aspirations, and what predicts realisation or deviation? Swiss adolescents show more gendered aspiration patterns than their German counterparts, reflecting traditional gender roles and stronger labour market segmentation. In both countries, more girls than boys aspire to tertiary occupations. However, German students are more likely to aspire to tertiary qualifications despite the smaller tertiary employment sector, reflecting Germany’s academic emphasis compared to Switzerland’s vocational focus. In the second step, we analyse occupational realisation in the labour market, considering initial aspirations, and interpreting patterns of (de-)gendering and upgrading in the light of individual and institutional conditions. This study contributes to understanding how policy and institutional contexts shape life course transitions.

Pia N. Blossfeld¹; Silke L. Schneider²

¹ University of Innsbruck; ² GESIS

Societies around the globe have experienced an expansion of education, including higher education (HE), in the last century. Whether this has led to a reduction of educational inequalities, as proponents of modernization theory would have it, has been the subject of debate. While some studies indeed find mostly declining inequalities in access to or success in HE in many countries (Breen et al., 2009, Barone and Ruggera, 2018), others have found mostly persistence (Shavit et al., 2007) or even increasing inequalities (Ortiz/Gervasi and Palomo Lario, 2024). This study contributes to this literature by covering a broader range of countries, more recent cohorts and larger samples, to increase our ability to detect changes over time. Using data from the European Social Survey (rounds 5 to 11) and the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (cycles 1 and 2) and logistic regression models for individual countries, we examine (1) how countries vary in their educational expansion patterns and (2) whether educational inequality has changed across birth cohorts (1949/59-1988/98) in 36 industrialized countries. Our results suggest that, firstly, regardless of the state and speed of educational expansion, type of welfare state, education system or world region, academic children can always clearly distinguish themselves from non-academic children in terms of the likelihood of obtaining a higher education degree. Secondly, there is little evidence for the size of the advantage to shrink across cohorts. This finding suggests that academic families adapt to the education system and changes therein to maintain their social advantages.

Tobias Grabosch; Mark Lutter; Thomas Heinze

University of Wuppertal

This paper examines the hiring and placement network of German professors in the fields of psychology and political science. It is well known that in the stratified university system of the United States, the capability of departments to place their PhD graduates as professors in academic departments is highly skewed. In contrast, the German university system is considered to be more egalitarian. Focusing on psychology and political science, this paper reveals that the placement network of German universities has a similar degree of inequality as that in the United States. We show that a few influential departments dominate their fields and that the majority of departments have little to no placement power. The paper also discusses whether department size and publication productivity are explanatory factors. The unequal success of departments in placing their PhD graduates as professors raises questions about intellectual diversity in the German university system.