Educational integration by the third generation? Placement and academic achievement of students with immigrant background in Germany

Abstract

Studies show that minority students who were born abroad or whose parents were born abroad are less successful in school than their majority peers. However, little is known on whether these disadvantages persist for the grandchildren of immigrants, i.e., the third generation. Assimilation theories come to different predictions for third-generation students’ educational integration. We investigate third-generation students’ placement in different school types and their reading and mathematics achievements in Germany. Using data on ninth graders (N = 14,958) collected in the National Educational Panel Study enabled us to precisely identify third-generation students and to distinguish students by their ancestors’ countries of birth. Our results reveal that most third-generation students did not differ in their educational success from their majority peers, while first-generation and some groups of second-generation students, on average, were less successful in school. Overall, our findings are in line with classical and new assimilation theories and suggest that educational integration is mostly “completed” by the third generation in Germany. For some groups, however, we do not observe the major trends predicted by classical and new assimilation theories but patterns suggesting processes expected in segmented assimilation theory.