Abstract
From a life-course perspective, school leaving certificates mark the end of a crucial phase in a person’s life. The school system as part of a national life course regime produces academically ‘successful’ and ‘not successful’ students, and, by certifying their degree of success, opens or closes gates to further education and different types of occupations. From the point of view of migration research, educational outcomes represent the first mile-stone of structural integration in an immigrant child’s life course in the country of destination. Hence, these outcomes – school leaving certificates – are of interest to both migration and life-course research.
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Notes
- 1.
Special schools (Sonderschulen) for children with so-called learning disabilities are de facto the lowest track. 80% of Sonderschul-students do not attain any school certificate (Powell and Pfahl 2008: 2). Individuals without school certificate are usually either former students of Sonderschulen or dropped out of Hauptschulen.
- 2.
So far, there are no statistics whatsoever on the recognition of foreign school certificates by German authorities. Although, in the case of Aussiedler, the regulation referred to above (KMK 1997) provided for the recognition of low-level and mid-level school certificates based on the number of school years attended in the home country, the value of such officially recognized certificates on the labor market is questionable (especially without adequate knowledge of German). In fact, integration policies offer special programs that allow Aussiedler youth acquiring German certificates. In the case of the high-level certificate, instead of a simple recognition procedure Aussiedler have to pass an Abitur-like exam in order study at German universities.
- 3.
Among minor-aged Aussiedler, only the minority stemming from Romania actually spoke German as their first language (Silbereisen et al. 1999: 83–84).
- 4.
Non-EU parents in Germany have to have a secure legal status and must not be dependent from social welfare if they want their children to join them from abroad.
- 5.
Only Jews from Ex-USSR as a special category of refugees encountered a positive reception approaching that of Aussiedler.
- 6.
The following results are based on the full sample made accessible on-site at the Statistical Office Berlin-Brandenburg, Forschungsdatenzentrum (FDZ).
- 7.
Only those are included who lived in the former West-German regional states (Bundesländer) including West-Berlin in the year 2005. The overwhelming majority of immigrants live in this part of Germany.
- 8.
This broad definition of the 1.5 generation is the ‘average’ of the “1.75 cohort who arrived as pre-school children”, the more strictly defined “1.5 generation, ages 6–12” and the “1.25 cohort, ages 13–17” (Rumbaut 2004: 1181).
- 9.
The following analysis presupposes that immigrant youths taking part in the Mikrozensus thought indeed of their German school certificates when answering the respective question.
- 10.
In two instances I will report descriptive findings for the 1.5 generation immigrants without this upper age limit, i.e. 18- to 35-year-olds (larger case numbers, but no information on their parents).
- 11.
Although in the Mikrozensus-questionnaire foreign-born parents had to fit their non-German educational degrees into the pattern of German certificates, there are very few missing answers and the positive correlation between parents’ and children’s educational attainment shows the expected pattern.
- 12.
In previous waves of the Mikrozensus like in most other official statistics or surveys, Aussiedler are counted as German citizens and are not identifiable at all.
- 13.
Almost three times as many non-German immigrant children than Aussiedler-children arrived in Germany between 1987 and 2003, but many of former left again before the survey was conducted in the year 2005.
- 14.
A comparison of ‚Mikrozensus-Aussiedler’ (including those with missing answers to some of the identification criteria) to my analysis with another data base, the German Youth Survey 2003 (Deutsche Jugendsurvey), where participants were simply asked whether they came from an Aussiedler family (Söhn 2008: 414), revealed very similar results regarding key variables such as educational attainment (Söhn 2011).
- 15.
Multinomial logistic regressions – more difficult to interpret than binary logistic regression (see Kohler and Kreuter 2009: 290–291) – were also calculated and lead to similar results as those presented below.
- 16.
In an alternative approach, logistic regression models with an interaction term were calculated for the full sample and revealed similar results.
- 17.
In addition, 8% of the latter, but only 2% of the former have left school without a certificate, see Table 2.A1.
- 18.
Possibly, this effect of age at migration among Aussiedler is strengthened by an effect of immigrant cohorts. (When looking at specific birth cohorts, age at migration is simply a mathematical transformation of the year of arrival.) Aussiedler children who arrived in pre-school age, which means until 1993, benefited from a more generous political context of reception than later cohorts. Aussiedler-specific integration programs were reduced in the course of the 1990s. Furthermore, those early cohorts comprise a small number of ethnic Germans from Romania, who typically spoke German as their primary language upon arrival.
- 19.
The four groups are too small to run separate multivariate models.
- 20.
Thirdly, the results presented here only capture the educational attainment of immigrants who remained in Germany until 2005 excluding those who attended German schools only for a number of years and left Germany again before 2005. As many ex-Yugoslavian refugees and other refugees denied asylum had to leave, this socially selective outmigration probably leads to a rosier picture of those who stayed – however it is unclear whether the strength of the age-at migration effect is affected.
- 21.
Another multivariate model not shown here reveals that among immigrant youths arriving during secondary education the specific governmental mode of incorporation plays no significant role, while among younger immigrant children, the privileged Aussiedler status exerts the positive influenced visible in the main model (Table 2.1).
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Söhn, J. (2011). Immigrants’ Educational Attainment: A Closer Look at the Age-at-Migration Effect. In: Wingens, M., Windzio, M., de Valk, H., Aybek, C. (eds) A Life-Course Perspective on Migration and Integration. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1545-5_2
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