How structure signals status: institutional stratification and the transition from higher education to work in Germany and Britain

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

Abstract In recent years, the transition from higher education to work in comparative perspective has attracted increasing attention from scholars and practitioners alike. Previous studies reveal similarities and differences in labour market outcomes across countries, but explanatory frameworks mainly refer to fields of study, whereas differences by types of institutions and types of degrees remain largely descriptive. Therefore, this paper specifically focuses on these institutional structures by arguing that the institutional stratification of higher education systems is crucial for shaping graduate employment prospects. More specifically, it is assumed that the higher the vertical differentiation of types of institutions or types of degrees, the stronger the differences of employment outcomes. This assumption is tested empirically by analysing two country cases most different in the institutional set-up of their higher education systems: Germany and Britain. By applying hazard models to the German Socio-Economic Panel and two British cohort studies (NCDS and BCS70), the paper shows that the vertical differentiation of British higher education institutions and degrees differentiates the transitions to the service class more strongly than in Germany. Thus, for understanding transition patterns from higher education to work in comparative perspective, it is necessary to take into account the institutional structure of higher education systems. Keywords: higher educationinstitutional stratificationemploymentGermanyBritain Acknowledgements Earlier versions of this paper were presented at several university research seminars in Germany and at the University of Stirling, UK. In particular, I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of JEW for their many helpful comments and welcome suggestions for improvement. This research has also benefited strongly from discussions with Ansgar Weymann and Reinhold Sackmann. In addition, I am grateful to Aletta Diefenbach and Diana Lange for helping me with proofreading, formatting and laying out graphs. The SOEP data have kindly been provided by the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), Berlin, and the two cohort studies by the UK Data Archive. Of course, neither institution bears any responsibility for the use made of the data nor the inferences drawn by the author. Notes 1. Contrary to the use in stratification research, where the term stratification refers to the (re-)production of social inequalities in a society (Grusky Citation2001), scholars of comparative school-to-work transition research use the term stratification to describe the formal institutional structure of education systems (see Allmendinger Citation1989). 2. This was at least the case until the reforms of the Bologna Process were introduced in German higher education (CRE Citation2000). In the course of the Bologna Process, a two-tier structure of bachelor's and master's degrees is gradually being introduced in German higher education, which is, accordingly, becoming more similar to the British system. Yet, it is too early to draw final conclusions about whether the Bologna Process indeed serves the harmonisation and convergence of higher education. But in order to understand the changes it introduces not only to higher education systems but also to the very nature of graduate careers itself, it is necessary to go one step back and ask how national institutions influenced graduate career developments in different countries prior to Bologna, as is done in this paper. 3. See Careers after Higher Education: a European Research Study, at http://www.uni-kassel.de/wz1/tseregs.htm. The successor of the CHEERS study, the so-called REFLEX study, surveyed the first five years of labour market entry of students, who graduated in 2000, in 16 countries (see http://www.fdewb.unimaas.nl/roa/reflex/). 4. The concept of 'tracking' has two different meanings in educational research (Hallinan Citation2000), the first referring to ability grouping of pupils within one school, for example, by means of different course levels, the second standing for different school types preparing for particular forms of postsecondary education or labour market careers. In this paper, tracking refers to the latter meaning. 5. For a comprehensive discussion, see Leuze (Citation2010, 100–124). 6. Within the 'old' universities, there are two further lines along which universities are separated. The first one is related to the age of university institutions, according to which the traditional universities, most of which were already established in the Medieval, are distinguished from university institutions founded in Britain during the first wave of higher education expansion in the 1960s, which are often referred to as 'new' universities. In addition, a more informal divide exists within the old university institutions, related to institutional reputation and research strength. A self-selected informal coalition of 19 research-led institutions has been formed (often referred to as Russell Group), which encompasses mainly the oldest and most prestigious higher education institutions, but also some of the new universities (Chevalier and Conlon Citation2003). But also within the new universities, internal differentiation started to emerge, since some former polytechnics are now well-regarded institutions in the UK and internationally. However, since the data-sets used for Britain do not contain any information on institutional differentiation within old nor new universities, higher education stratification will be restricted to a differentiation between pre-1992 universities on the one hand and polytechnics and non-university institutions on the other. 7. Such a perspective questions the institutional congruence of BA and Fachhochschule degrees, as implied by many cross-national educational classification systems. ISCED 1997 (UNESCO Citation1997), for example, classifies both types of degrees in the same category, which neither reflects on the different durations nor on the hierarchical ordering of degrees in both countries. 8. Even though the most commonly used British data-set for comparisons with the SOEP is the British Household Panel Study (BHPS), this paper does not use it, since it does not contain sufficient information on its respondents' post-secondary education. 9. Other measures of vertical differences in employment outcomes are status and prestige scales (see Ganzeboom and Treiman Citation2003 for an overview). Nevertheless, this paper makes use of the EGP class scheme since according to Müller and Shavit (Citation1998, 26), employment in various EGP classes has proven to be the most robust indicator to capture country differences in institutional stratification. 10. The used British data-sets allow for identifying former polytechnics even after the reforms of 1992, when many of them were officially acknowledged as universities. 11. Due to data restrictions and missing values, the parental socio-economic background as well as ethnicity had to be coded differently for both countries. Despite knowing that these variables are measuring different socio-structural aspects in both countries and are thus of limited use for the direct comparison, they have been included in order to control for within-country variations. 12. The survivor function represents the share of persons that have not yet made the transition to a first job at any given point of time. The so-called failure function is the inverse of the survivor function and refers to the share of individuals that already have made a particular transition at any time of observation. Since the analysis of the transition from higher education to work is more interested in the latter group, the failure function for various labour market outcomes is presented in the next section. A graphic comparison of survivor and failure functions in Germany and Britain has to take into account the 95 per cent confidence intervals (95% CI) of the curves as well, since only a non-overlap of these intervals indicates significantly different transition rates in both countries (Blossfeld and Rohwer Citation1995). 13. It might of course be argued that the more favourable starting positions of German graduates are less a result of a stratified education system, but rather a consequence of the overall EGP class distribution. That this is not the case is indicated by an inspection of the overall class distribution of persons in employment (not shown here), according to which the amount of EGP class I positions is roughly the same in both countries, while the number of people employed in EGP class II is almost twice as high in Britain than in Germany (results can be obtained from the author upon request). 14. The first model comprises control variables and types of institutions, the second comprises types of degrees and the third includes all variables. Since, however, Fachhochschule institution and Fachhochschule degree in Germany both measure the same empirical fact, no model including both types of institutions and types of degrees is presented. For better readability, only the variables of interest are shown, while the full models can be found in the Appendix.