The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on students’ transition from high school to post-secondary education

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Does the COVID-19 pandemic influence educational expectations and decisions of high school students and does the COVID-19 pandemic increase social inequalities in the school-to-work transition? Answering these questions is important because of two main reasons: First, research unambiguously shows that educational decisions at the end of school have long-lasting pecuniary and non-pecuniary consequences. Second, if the COVID-19 pandemic distorts educational expectations in a way that high school students abandon or change initially preferred educational plans, this may cause high individual and societal costs.Our project will analyse in an interdisciplinary approach that combines economic and sociological perspectives how high school student’s expectations develop over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and how it affects transitions of high school students into post-secondary education. In addition, our proposal will investigate the role of parental labour market shocks due to the COVID-19 pandemic on school to work transitions. Furthermore, a factorial survey experiment will investigate whether potential educational support policies (e.g., easy access to financial support) mitigate adverse insecurity effects due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For our analysis, we will use a unique panel data set on 8,000 high school students from the graduation cohorts 2020 and 2021 from eight German Federal States with information before and during (and potentially after) the COVID-19 pandemic. The student data will be enriched with parental survey and register information. Using this data, our research answers the following questions: 1. How do educational expectations and decisions of high school students with different social backgrounds change during the COVID-19 pandemic? 2. Does the Covid-19 pandemic induced parental labour market insecurity affect educational expectations and educational decisions of high school students? 3. Can educational support policies buffer the effect of high school student’s insecurity on educational expectations during the COVID-19 pandemic?In answering these questions, our proposal will add comprehensive knowledge on costs of the COVID-19 pandemic, its effect on social inequality and potential policies to reduce these costs.