Abstract
The present article analyzes the development of the ethnic gap—with respect to the attainment of vocational degrees—over the immigration cohorts 1960–2001 by examining how social integration indicators and general secondary school education may help to explain the trend. It was found that the gap between natives and migrants increased. Above all, the large increase in the gap over cohorts between Germans and Turks is alarming. In contrast to that the gap and its increase between the group of immigrants from Central-/Eastern-/Southeastern European countries as well as from other former recruitment countries and German natives is comparably small and can to a large extent be explained by a growing gap regarding the level of general secondary education among the newer immigration cohorts and native Germans due to educational expansion and to a growing impact of the secondary school education for the achievement of vocational education. The effect of social integration plays a smaller role compared to general secondary school education and it even decreases over immigration cohorts.
Highlights
With growing relevance for more and more European countries, questions about immigrant integration are generating increasing interest in empirical research
Since a migrants/native gap exists in the achievement of higher school leaving certificates, which could have increased due to educational expansion in Germany, the following can be hypothesized: Having a low general secondary education increases in importance with respect to explaining the ethnic gap in the attainment of vocational degrees for newer immigration cohorts in comparison to earlier immigration cohorts (H2)
This section first describes the distribution of the characteristics of nationality and the cohort groups. It describes the development of ethnic inequality over cohorts and the impact of education and social integration on the attainment of vocational degrees
Summary
With growing relevance for more and more European countries, questions about immigrant integration are generating increasing interest in empirical research. Existing research on ethnic inequality in the vocational education system usually focuses on the level of inequality at a specific point in time (Beicht and Granato 2011; Diehl, Friedrich, and Hall 2009; Helland and Støren 2006; Hunkler 2010; Laganà, Chevillard, and Gauthier 2014; Roth 2014; Urban 2012) These studies have shown that the inequality between migrants and natives with respect to their participation in tertiary or vocational education can be explained, in part, by the lower level of general secondary education achieved by migrants and their lack of a social network. The comparison of the results between different immigration cohorts aims at disentangling the possible causes of the trend in ethnic inequality, and increases the understanding of the impact that differences in the individual characteristics have on changing the economic structure of Europe
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