Alternative Routes to Higher Education Eligibility: Disentangling Diversion Processes from Higher Education

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Institutional routes to higher education eligibility in Germany have become more and more diverse over the past decades. Almost 50 percent of recent upper secondary school leaver cohorts do not obtain their eligibility for higher education via the traditional standard pathway at the Gymnasium. Previous research has documented that these alternative pathways are associated to particularly low and decreasing transition rates into higher education. The suggested project seeks to disentangle the social processes that are responsible for the phenomenon and provide empirical evidence uncovering the underlying mechanisms. Two different but potentially complementary processes have been suggested as explanations in the literature: First, selection effects arising from increasing upper secondary attainment rates among students who never intended to enter higher education, and second, idiosyncratic influences of alternative pathways that have a negative impact on students' competencies and bias educational and occupational aspirations towards non-academic preferences. The project aims at specifying these explanations further and will conduct the first empirical tests of the suggested mechanisms. The empirical data analyses will be based on the starting cohorts 3 (fifth-graders) and 4 (ninth-graders) of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). These data allow for a longitudinal assessment of the development of competences and educational and occupational aspirations through lower and upper secondary education. In addition, the data allow for linking this development both to the choice and to the influences of different learning environments provided by the various pathways to upper secondary education. By targeting at the causal processes behind the differences in higher education transition rates that are associated to different routes to higher education eligibility, the project will make an innovative contribution to the debate on inclusion versus diversion in the context of diversification in upper secondary education. Hereby, it will be possible for the first time to incorporate the new pathways to higher education eligibility that have been opened up through the reforms of the secondary school systems that have recently been conducted in the German federal states.