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The working status of students and time to degree at German universities

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Abstract

This paper analyzes time to first degree at German universities. The database is the “Absolventenpanel” 2001, a panel study conducted by the “Hochschul-Informations-System.” The German university system is characterized by a long duration of study; the regular time is often exceeded. One potential reason might be the high proportion of students reporting part-time work during their studies. This paper focuses on the relationship between the working status of German students and their time to degree. Besides that, additional individual characteristics and parental background are included. Analysis is carried out for ten fields of study separately. The descriptive analysis reveals a positive correlation between the amount of part-time work and the duration of study. In the empirical analysis, the Cox proportional hazards model is applied. The results confirm that part-time work has an increasing effect on time to degree. These results and the aspect that mainly socially underprivileged students are engaged in part-time working during their studies should be considered in the political discussions of tertiary education financing and the Bologna process.

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Notes

  1. With “work” we refer throughout to on-campus or off-campus part-time work (usually to earn money) in distinction to studying.

  2. BaföG (Federal Education and Training Assistance Act) is the main source of financial student aid in Germany for students from low-income families.

  3. Additional panels started in the years 2005 and 2009, but are not yet available. Also the third wave of the Absolventenpanel 2001 is not yet available.

  4. For more information see Schramm and Beck (2010).

  5. Source: Statistisches Bundesamt (2014).

  6. For more details about the variables of the Absolventenpanel 2001, see Schramm and Beck (2010).

  7. An aggregated (over all fields) comparison is displayed in Fig. 4 showing the whole distribution of durations conditionally on work intensity.

  8. Synonym: duration analysis, event history analysis, time-to-event analysis, failure time analysis. For a more detailed description of the methodology, see, e.g., Kalbfleisch and Prentice (2002) and Tableman and Kim (2004) for an application with S.

  9. It is also possible to include time-variant variables in the model (extended Cox model). This leads to a violation of the PH assumption.

  10. The PH assumption is tested by Schoenfeld residuals and holds in all models for the most relevant variables, e.g., the working status.

  11. Notice that there is no intercept; it is part of the baseline hazard, which is canceled out of the estimation.

  12. An alternative way of modeling the time to degree is the poisson model. In the poisson model the covariates affect the expected value of terms studied. The results of the poisson model confirm the findings of the Cox model regarding the covariate effects on duration and their significance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Duisburg-Essen, Universitaetsstrasse 12, 45117, Essen, Germany

    Katja Theune

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  1. Katja Theune
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Correspondence to Katja Theune.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 10, 11, 12 and Figs. 1, 2, 3, 4

Table 10 Median duration by degree
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Fig. 1
figure 1

Evolution of entry cohorts 1980–2011 (at the level of the German population). Data: Statistisches Bundesamt (2014)

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Table 11 Aggregation of fields of study
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Table 12 Variables of the data set
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Fig. 2
figure 2

Distribution of study time

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Fig. 3
figure 3

Distribution of study time (without outliers)

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Fig. 4
figure 4

Distribution of duration by work

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Theune, K. The working status of students and time to degree at German universities. High Educ 70, 725–752 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-015-9864-z

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