Who dares wins? Do higher realistic occupational aspirations improve the chances of migrants for access to dual vocational education and training in Germany?

ABSTRACT

High educational aspirations are considered to be a crucial factor for educational success and social advancement. As is also the case in many western European countries, migrants in Germany have higher aspirations than non-migrants. Although migrants’ average school performance levels are significantly lower, their greater educational aspirations exert a positive influence on the acquisition of higher educational qualifications. This paper investigates whether higher aspirations are also revealed in respect of Germany’s highly prevalent dual vocational education and training (VET) system and how this affects the transition to dual VET for young people from a migration background. Multivariate analyses using the database of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) relate to school-leavers in Years 9 and 10 of general schools who aspired to enter dual VET upon completion of schooling. If we control for the main influencing factors, young people from a migrant background are shown to exhibit higher occupational aspirations with regard to dual VET than their counterparts not from a migration background. However, viewed in overall terms, higher occupational aspirations lead to poorer chances of transition to dual VET. This is much more noticeable amongst migrants than amongst non-migrants.

KEYWORDS:

• Young people from a migrant background
• occupational aspirations
• dual vocational education and training
• transition to vocational education and training

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This work uses data from the German Educational Panel Study (NEPS) – Year 9 start cohort, doi:10.5157/NEPS:SC4:9.0.0 . The NEPS data was collected between 2008 and 2013 as part of a framework programme to promote empirical educational research, which was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Since 2014, the NEPS has been continued by the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) at the University of Bamberg in conjunction with a network that covers the whole of Germany.

2. We exclude school-leavers from special schools from our analyses because divergent sets of survey instruments were used for this group and no competence tests were conducted.

3. In the NEPS, information regarding occupations has been coded in accordance with the 2010 Classification of Occupations 2010 (KldB 2010). This facilitates the precise identification of occupations for which training takes place within the dual VET system (referred to below as dual occupations).

4. Just under half (47%) of school-leavers surveyed after Year 9 or Year 10 stated a dual occupation as a realistic aspiration, and of these 79% actually made endeavours to enter training in dual occupations upon leaving school. 22% stated other types of occupations as a realistic aspiration, and no information regarding occupational aspirations is available for 31% of respondents.

5. However, if only one grandparent was born abroad (Generation 3.75), we did not assume a migration background.

6. The ISEI-08 values of the occupations stated as aspirations by the young people are already included in the NEPS data.

7. In the NEPS, weighted maximum likelihood estimates (WLE) were calculated as estimators of competence and are of metric scale. WLEs are considered to be ‘the best point estimates of the individual competence scores’ (Pohl and Carstensen 2012, 12).

8. Analyses including the multiple imputations were conducted using the statistical software (Impute missing values using chained equations). Imputation of missing values also took place for further independent variables alongside the variable of ‘socio-economic status of the father (or of the mother)’. 10 imputations were carried out (m = 10).

9. We used the svy command in Stata to define each school included as a cluster and to specific the calibrated cross-sectional weight as a probability weight (pweight).

10. The AME state ‘by how many percentage points the probability of the event of interest changes as an average of all (group-specific) observations, if the explanatory variable concerned increases by one unit (marginal)’ (Auspurg and Hinz 2011, 66). For categorical variables, the AME state by how many percentage points the average probability for the event of interest differs in the observed group from the probability of the respective reference group.

11. This constitutes a significant difference. The investigation as to whether the AME differ significantly between both groups was conducted in accordance with the procedure described by Auspurg and Hinz (2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ursula Beicht

Ursula Beicht is an academic researcher in the ‘Sociology and Economics of Vocational Education and Training’ Department at the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training, Bonn. Her main research topics have been transitions from school to training and work, participation of young migrants in general education and vocational education, costs and benefits of vocational education and training.

Günter Walden

Dr. Günter Walden is a retired director of the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training, Bonn, and a former Head of the ‘Sociology and Economics of Vocational Education and Training’ Department. His main research topics have been transitions from school to training and work, participation of young migrants in general education and vocational education and training, training behaviour of companies, costs and benefits of vocational education and training.