Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie

The German education system includes a variety of educational pathways to school-leaving qualifications via general and vocationally oriented schools. This article presents a vignette study used to experimentally analyse the selection of applicants from general and vocationally oriented schools with…

This article investigates students’ access to social capital and its role in their educational decisions in the stratified German school system. We measure social capital as the availability of highly educated adults in adolescents’ and parents’ social networks. Using panel data on complete friendsh…

Many empirical studies have demonstrated positive ethnic choice effects at the transition to upper secondary education. This means that ethnic minority students—given the same academic performance, parental resources and type of school at lower secondary level—aspire to more demanding educational pr…

Gender disparities in wages are still fairly large. On average, women earn less than men from the beginning of their careers. This article investigates whether young men and women with vocational education and training receive different returns for occupation-specific and general skills, a topic tha…

People’s occupations are strongly related to multiple dimensions of inequality, such as inequalities in wages, health, autonomy, or risk of temporary employment. The theories and mechanisms linking occupations to these inequalities are subject to debate. We review the recent evidence on the relation…

There is a long tradition of studying the significance of occupations for social inequality. In this introductory article, we outline the contributions to this special issue of Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie in the context of the research into occupations carried out so far.…

This study provides novel insights into the institutional conditions under which skilled immigrants get hired for skilled jobs in different countries. We argue that immigrants’ hiring chances depend on the interplay between institutions in sending countries, which determine the type of education tha…

Young people develop their occupational plans and expectations by interacting with significant others in the social contexts in which they operate. Within given institutional opportunity structures, regional labour markets are important socio-spatial contexts that determine the development of occupa…

The study investigates to what extent students in lower and intermediate secondary school tracks in Germany have gender-(a)typical aspirations at the end of their schooling, but choose occupations that differ from these aspirations in the application process and in the first vocational training posi…

Approximately one quarter of all school leavers from lower secondary education does not finish apprenticeship training or an equivalent school-based vocational training in Germany before age 25. This group of low-qualified individuals suffers from a clearly increased risk of being unemployed, of hav…

Graduates of the German dual system of vocational education and training differ in their chances of directly entering horizontally and vertically matching labour market positions. This article discusses how structural characteristics of training occupations impact such differences. I focus on three …

Despite profound economic and social changes in recent decades, many school leavers in Germany still go through the dual system of vocational training. The stability of this educational institution raises the question of whether, and if so how, apprentices’ entries into employment have changed in th…

Vocational education systems (VET) convey occupation-specific skills to their students. If the demand for the particular skills is scarce at the time when VET graduates attempt to enter the labor market, they run the risk of not being able to make use of them. This is not only the case when VET grad…

This paper studies influencing factors of premature dissolutions of apprenticeship contracts in the dual vocational education and training (VET) system by analyzing cohort data from the German census on VET from reporting years 2008 to 2011. The data set covers all contracts that firstly started in …

For several years, there is an increasing discussion in Germany that youths are less and less ready for vocational training. According to these reports that have been published by employers' representatives, there exists a relatively high share of youths whose cognitive competencies are too low to b…

This paper examines if and to what extent educational opportunities of immigrant and native youth are affected by the regional proportion of firm- versus school-based vocational education and training (VET) in Germany and Switzerland. As school-based VET systems, compared to training firms, select t…

Growing risks in working lives and in the transition to the first job are supposed to be a core characteristic of labor market changes in the last two decades. However, they cover heterogeneous phenomena that have to be treated separately. Regarding the job entry process among in-firm training diplo…