Selections and social selectivity on the academic track: A life-course analysis of educational attainment in Germany

The paper confirms the usefulness of transition research for understanding the process of educational attainment; an analysis based on transitions is clearly superior to an analysis which focuses purely on stock figures of educational attainment. However, the paper also shows that conventional forms of transition research are often too simple as they assume an ideal-typical sequence of transitions during education. Educational careers in reality often deviate from this model. The number of young people (and in particular lower class children) who try to join the 'academic track' at least once during their educational career is much higher than the number of those who graduate successfully in the end. Accounting for the most relevant events helps to understand the quantitative and qualitative selectivity of the German educational system and may serve as a model for research on other aspects of educational inequality as well as on other educational systems.