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

在过去的几十年里，德国获得高等教育资格的机构途径变得越来越多样化。近50%的最近高中毕业生没有通过体育馆传统的标准途径获得接受高等教育的资格。以前的研究已经证明，这些替代途径与进入高等教育的转化率特别低和不断下降有关。建议的项目试图理清造成这一现象的社会过程，并提供经验证据，揭示潜在的机制。文献中提出了两个不同但可能互补的过程作为解释：第一，由于从未打算进入高等教育的学生的高中毕业率提高而产生的选择效应，第二，替代途径的特殊影响，这些途径对学生的能力产生负面影响，并将教育和职业抱负偏向于非学术偏好。该项目旨在进一步明确这些解释，并将对所建议的机制进行第一次经验测试。实证数据分析将基于国家教育小组研究(NEPS)的起始队列3(五年级学生)和4(九年级学生)。这些数据使我们能够通过初中和高中教育对能力发展以及教育和职业抱负进行纵向评估。此外，数据还允许将这一发展与高中教育的各种途径提供的不同学习环境的选择和影响联系起来。通过针对不同途径获得高等教育资格的不同高等教育转化率差异背后的因果过程，该项目将对高中教育多样化背景下关于包容与分流的辩论作出创新性的贡献。因此，通过德国联邦各州最近进行的中学系统改革开辟的高等教育资格新途径将首次成为可能。

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.