Not only enrollment and retention: comparing the study trajectories at German universities and Universities of Applied Sciences

ABSTRACT

While there is an existing scholarly debate on whether less research-oriented universities disrupt or enable higher education success, we know less about students’ actual study patterns beyond static indicators, such as completion or dropout. To address this gap, this article analyzes the study trajectories of bachelor’s students at German universities and Universities of Applied Sciences (UASs). As a methodological contribution, study trajectories are reconstructed using sequence analysis, thereby providing a holistic perspective over a period of more than five years using data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) – a panel study that follows first-time higher education students throughout their higher education career. This study finds that UAS students are more likely than university students to experience linear study trajectories, whereas university students more often experience discontinuous trajectories. This finding remains robust against differences in individual student characteristics, including access pathways. Thus, this study concludes that studying at a UAS safeguards against engaging in detours or long and winding study trajectories.

KEYWORDS:

• Universities of Applied Sciences
• higher education pathways
• study trajectories
• enrollment patterns
• sequence analysis
• NEPS
• university types

Acknowledgement

This paper uses data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS): Starting Cohort 5 – First-Year Students, doi:10.5157/NEPS:SC5:15.0.0. From 2008 to 2013, NEPS data were collected as part of the Framework Programme for the Promotion of Empirical Educational Research funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). As of 2014, the NEPS survey has been carried out by the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) at the University of Bamberg in cooperation with a nationwide network.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Universities with a specific focus, such as pedagogical and technical universities, art or theological colleges, and universities of public administration, are subsumed here under universities. Universities and UASs are not the only HEI types, but with 96% of all students attending them they are the most relevant.

2 With the exception of some fields, universities almost completely replaced the long, single-cycle Magister and Diplom degrees. The state examinations degree (Staatsexamen) is only offered at universities in fields such as medicine, pharmacy, law, and to some extent, in teaching studies.

3 Comprehensive checks of trajectory indicators (e.g. study completion, major switch, study duration) against alternative data sources (e.g. the DZHW Panel Study of School Leavers and administrative data) yielded fairly similar results. This data is available upon request.

4 A running count of all the bachelor’s degree programs in which students enrolled was created. These were merged into one category, ‘>Second BA Studies, Not Completed.’ Since long degree programmes (Staatsexamen) are not offered at UASs, trajectories in which students had switched from a bachelor’s degree to a long degree type were excluded.

5 In this sample, 26% of the students were enrolled at a UAS and 74% at a university. This deviates somewhat from official data which suggests that 60% of students were at universities compared to 40% at UASs (cf. https://www.datenportal.bmbf.de/portal/de/Tabelle-2.5.20.html, last accessed on 23/09/2020).

6 Relative risk ratios of the respective models are included in the appendix.

7 Based on a visual inspection of the dendrogram, the Calinski-Harabasz, and the Duda-Hart cluster stopping indices (Cornwell 2015).