Dropping Out of Higher Education in Germany: Using Retrospective Life Course Data to Determine Dropout Rates and Destinations of Non-completers

In recent years, the high rates of higher education dropout have raised attention of education research and policy makers in Germany. However, due to data privacy legislation, it remains challenging to obtain information about the individual progress of students through higher education and the destinations of non-completers. With conventional administrative or cross-sectional data, it is not possible to distinguish non-completion from dropout, so that it mostly has to remain unclear if non-completers reach graduation elsewhere. This contribution uses the retrospective life course data of the NEPS starting cohort 6 to empirically disentangle non-completion and dropout of full-time students in higher education. We discuss the methodological challenges of conventional approaches and show how the advantages of retrospective life course data can be exploited for higher education research. We furthermore examine the destinations of non-completers and dropouts as well as the labour market returns of dropouts, using sequence data analyses and logistic regressions. Our results show that conventional designs possibly are prone to overestimate dropout rates. Longitudinal analyses of destinations after dropout reveal that the permeability between vocational training and higher education is not unidirectional. Vocational training is a relevant absorber of higher education dropouts, but at the same time, vocational qualifications that were gained prior to higher education work as safety-net that buffers labour market risks of dropouts

Ready to Study? Academic Readiness of Traditional and Non-Traditional Students in Germany

Pathways to German higher education have diversified considerably during recent decades and approximately one quarter of all first year students enter higher education with a qualification for the skilled labour market. This contribution seeks to identify different types of pathways to higher education and examine the differences among these groups regarding five dimensions of self-reported academic readiness. For our analyses, we used data on Starting Cohort 5 of the National Educational Panel Study. Our results suggest that for most of the indicators of academic readiness, students who entered via non-traditional pathways reported lower levels of academic readiness than traditional students did. In particular, students without a formal higher-education entrance certificate reported lower levels of academic readiness than any other group did. These patterns remained largely stable after controlling for socio-demographic characteristics and institutional destination