Degrees of difference: Social inequalities in graduates' job opportunities in the UK and Germany

In 2011, the UK White Paper 'Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers: A Strategy for Social Mobility' recognised that 'there is a long way to go' for the achievement of a fair society in which every individual can achieve their potential, irrespective of their family circumstances (Cabinet Office, 2011:5). It also acknowledged that individuals from advantaged socio-economic backgrounds continue to be more likely to enter high-paid professional and managerial occupations than individuals from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. We refer to these as 'top-level' occupations; examples include doctors, lawyers or managers in large organisations

Optimal control for the thin-film equation: Convergence of a multi-parameter approach to track state constraints avoiding degeneracies

We consider an optimal control problem subject to the thin-film equation which is deduced from the Navier--Stokes equation. The PDE constraint lacks well-posedness for general right-hand sides due to possible degeneracies; state constraints are used to circumvent this problematic issue and to ensure well-posedness, and the rigorous derivation of necessary optimality conditions for the optimal control problem is performed. A multi-parameter regularization is considered which addresses both, the possibly degenerate term in the equation and the state constraint, and convergence is shown for vanishing regularization parameters by decoupling both effects. The fully regularized optimal control problem allows for practical simulations which are provided, including the control of a dewetting scenario, to evidence the need of the state constraint, and to motivate proper scalings of involved regularization and numerical parameters

A Note on the Practicality of Maximal Planar Subgraph Algorithms

Given a graph $G$, the NP-hard Maximum Planar Subgraph problem (MPS) asks for a planar subgraph of $G$ with the maximum number of edges. There are several heuristic, approximative, and exact algorithms to tackle the problem, but---to the best of our knowledge---they have never been compared competitively in practice. We report on an exploratory study on the relative merits of the diverse approaches, focusing on practical runtime, solution quality, and implementation complexity. Surprisingly, a seemingly only theoretically strong approximation forms the building block of the strongest choice.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 24th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2016

The association between graduates' field of study and occupational attainment in West Germany, 1980-2008

Over the course of higher education expansion and growing numbers of graduates, employers are supposed to have increasing difficulties to regard a higher education degree as reliable signal for productivity. As a consequence, they may take into account 'qualitative' differences such as graduates' field of study more often than in previous times when hiring labour market entrants. Both from a supply- and demand-side perspective graduates from humanities, social services or arts may be increasingly disadvantaged in terms of labour market outcomes compared to graduates from science, technology, engineering and mathematics over time. The article tests this argumentation by assessing changes in the relationship between graduates' field of study and risk of unemployment as well as access to the service class in West Germany between 1980 and 2008. Changes in returns to field of study may contribute to growing (social) inequalities among graduates amidst educational expansion and are therefore important to consider. Based on Microcensus data, the results show that field of study differences in terms of both labour market outcomes did not increasingly diverge over time. The paper concludes that due to a limited educational expansion and the prevalence of an occupationally segmented labour market higher education remains a good investment in terms of labour market returns in West Germany irrespective of graduates' field of study

Higher education and non-pecuniary returns in Germany : tracing the mechanisms behind field of study effects at the start of the career

This article addresses the question of why fields of study differ in early labour market returns. It is argued that the higher the potential training costs of a field of study the more problematic the labour market integration of graduates. This is due to the fact that employers use the occupational specificity and selectivity of a study programme as a signal for the expected training costs. In addition, the article suggests that structural relations between fields and occupations act as mediators for the effect of field of study on non-pecuniary returns. Using the German HIS Graduate Panel 1997, the results indicate that a lack of occupational specificity is partly responsible for differences between fields of study. Selectivity measures do not contribute to an explanation. As expected, working in the public sector and the required expertise for a job strongly mediate field of study differences