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Second-Generation Immigrants’ Entry into Higher Education: Students’ Enrollment Choices at Different Types of Universities

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Abstract

We examine the relationship between immigrant status and institutional choice in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). The EHEA addresses employability of graduates as a key area for action. In practice, universities vary in the degree to which they embed employability into their curricula. Using these differences as a basis for university-type classification, we examine whether institutional choices differ between native and second-generation immigrant students. The results of a survey of first-semester students reveal that more than half of the institutions with a strong professional profile are challenged by heterogeneous entry cohorts. One quarter of students enroll at these universities.

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Notes

  1. Bologna declaration, third page. The BD is available at www.ehea.info/media.ehea.info/file/Ministerial_conferences/02/8/1999_Bologna_Declaration_English_553028.pdf.

  2. That is, “the ability to purposefully use all the different competences in order to fulfill given professional tasks and/or to reach own professional targets and to adapt these competences to new environments and requirements” (http://ehea.info/page-employability).

  3. This view is consistent with the four freedoms of the European Union and EFTA countries, namely free movement of workers (and their families), of services, of goods, and of capital.

  4. For a description of the ISCED levels (International Standard Classification of Education), see UIS (2012).

  5. The original BD refers to a two-cycle system (Bachelor and Master studies). The 2003 Berlin communiqué then included Doctoral studies as the third cycle; the 2009 Leuven communiqué initiated the second decade of the Bologna process, putting emphasis on (the compatibility of) national qualification frameworks; and the 2012 Bucharest communiqué reiterated the priority of employability and improved employer engagement (EC et al. 2015). The 2015 Yerevan communiqué identified learning and teaching, social inclusion, and employability as priorities until 2020. Finally, the 2018 Paris communiqué from May 25, 2018, renews the commitment of participants in the EHEA beyond 2020 and promotes projects such as the European student card and the inclusion of short-cycle HE (EC et al. 2018).

  6. Implementation of the Bologna degree structure (Bachelor, Master, Doctorate) and facilitated recognition of national qualifications under the overarching framework for qualifications of the EHEA (QF-EHEA) supported the alignment process of study programs.

  7. The University of Bologna is the oldest European university in continuous operation (founded in 1088). The first universities in Germany were founded in Erfurt (founding charter 1379, closed 1816, reopened 1994), Heidelberg (1386, oldest university in continuous operation), and Cologne (1388, closed 1798, reopened 1919).

  8. Colleges/universities of art and music comprise the third institutional segment of HE institutions in Germany. They are not included in our study due to a substantially different concept of employability in music and arts.

  9. In the 2009 report to ministers, the responsible working group suggested the following operational definition for the concept of employability (BWGE 2009, p. 5): “employability as the ability to gain initial employment, to maintain employment, and to be able to move around within the labour market.”

  10. These universities have a comparative advantage in providing student career guidance and a profound network of cooperating firms. The strong EP profile environment encourages local firms to recognize and acknowledge study-related and social competencies of female students.

  11. Neugebauer and Spangenberg (2017) reveal supportive evidence for superior postgraduate wage profiles that UAS graduates can expect: UAS graduates with a Bachelor’s degree earn 5 to 13% higher entry wages compared to their UNI counterparts and also face a lower risk of unemployment (1.5 to 3.4%).

  12. By design, our survey does not include information on parental educational attainment and also lacks information on the age of the students. As entrance cohorts in Bachelor programs usually represent a fairly homogeneous sub-cohort in terms of age (around 20) and we are focusing on students who just started their first semester (not previously enrolled at university), we maintain the presumption of a homogenous age cohort throughout the analysis.

  13. Berufliches Gymnasium Wirtschaft.

  14. In this paper, the language spoken at home is the language spoken predominantly in the family context according to the participants. The extent to which the test takers are able to judge this might be questioned. As Kemper (2010, p. 322) points out, test takers might state German as their language spoken at home for reasons of social desirability and to express a high degree of willingness to integrate. For this study, the willingness to integrate does not compromise the argumentation on the impact of ethnic externalities on students’ enrollment choices. Future research might benefit from using data that also account for the actual linguistic abilities of students in Bachelor’s degree programs, which can be assessed using suitable tests. The ethnic externality impact, however, is related to the exposure of children to the dominant language of the country in their close neighborhoods.

  15. Hence, \(\varepsilon_{i} \left( \cdot \right)\sim{\text{iid }}\) extreme value type 1, such that \(F( {\varepsilon_{ij} }) = { \exp }( { - { \exp }( { - \varepsilon_{ij} })})\).

  16. StataCorp. 2017. Stata Statistical Software: Release 15. College Station, TX: StataCorp LLC. J. Scott Long and Jeremy Freese. 2014. Regression Models for Categorical Dependent Variables Using Stata, Third Edition. College Station, TX: Stata Press. The multinomial model is selected due to the random utility basis of the unordered choices (to be made by the students). Access to public universities in Germany is open to anyone with an HE entry certificate and there are no tuition fees. Moreover, the different choices are hardly close substitutes. Excluding, for instance, category c (UAS with a strong professional profile) from the choice menu would not cause the majority of students who have currently selected type c to reallocate to type b (that is, the UAS with a weak professional profile). This property is important for the standard IIA assumption of the multinomial logit framework (McFadden 1984). In this specific case, the p value of the Hausman test is .85.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments and very helpful suggestions. We received useful comments from participants in the Immigration Symposium at the 45th Eastern Economic Association Annual Conference in New York City, USA, 2019. The results reported in this paper were generated in the WiWiKom project. This work is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Grant Number 01PK11013).

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  1. Faculty of Business and Health, Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences, Interaktion 1, 33619, Bielefeld, Germany

    Vivian Carstensen

  2. School of Economics and Management, Leibniz University Hannover, Hannover, Germany

    Vivian Carstensen

  3. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Mainz, Germany

    Roland Happ & Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia

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Carstensen, V., Happ, R. & Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, O. Second-Generation Immigrants’ Entry into Higher Education: Students’ Enrollment Choices at Different Types of Universities. Eastern Econ J 46, 126–160 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41302-019-00148-1

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