Children of parents with less money and without a high school diploma are less likely to attend high school. Another study confirms this. However, there are differences between the federal states.
According to a study, children from families with lower levels of education and lower incomes are less likely to go to high school than their peers from better-off families with higher education. There are clear differences between the federal states.
As a study by the Ifo Institute shows, almost 27 percent of children in Germany with parents who neither have a high school diploma nor belong to the top quarter of income attend a high school. In families with at least one parent with a high school diploma and/or a household income in the upper quarter, the figure is almost 60 percent.
The Ifo Institute presented a study with similar results a year ago. This time the main aim was to highlight differences between the federal states.
“The inequality of educational opportunities is very pronounced in all federal states,” says the study. The relative difference or the ratio of opportunities between children “with a lower background” and those with a “higher background” is therefore better in countries such as Berlin (37/69), Brandenburg (35/66) or Rhineland-Palatinate (31/59). Bavaria (20/53) and Saxony (27/67) perform worse.
This is how the study is designed
According to the information, the basis for the investigation was the microcensus with data from 2018 and 2019. Households with at least one child between the ages of 10 and 18 were analyzed with a view to whether the children studied at high schools or universities. The second factor taken into account was the household’s net income and whether it was in the top quarter with at least 5,000 euros per month. According to the study, a total of 102,005 children were examined. The number of cases per federal state ranged from 947 children in Bremen to 23,022 children in North Rhine-Westphalia.
The study confirms findings from other educational studies that educational opportunities in Germany are strongly linked to social background. The differences found are statistically, educationally and economically significant, it said. “In fact, people with a high school diploma earn, on average, 42 percent more net monthly than people without a high school diploma.”
The authors call, among other things, for early childhood education offerings to be expanded for disadvantaged children and for distribution to be postponed between different secondary schools. Reference is made to Berlin and Brandenburg, where, unlike all other federal states, the primary school period only ends after the sixth grade.
The Education and Science Union (GEW) even advocates for even longer joint learning. “Equality of opportunity in education increases when students learn together at least up to the 10th grade. This is shown by the example of the Scandinavian countries. The less selection, the better each child can develop their educational potential,” said GEW board member Anja Bensinger-Stolze in a statement from the union.
Source: Stern
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