Faculty of Educational Science

Exploring the Quintessence of University-belonging Inequalities in Today’s Youth

EQUITY examines how students from diverse social-class, gender, and linguistic/ethnic backgrounds experience, construct, and negotiate a sense of belonging within Germany’s higher-education institutions. Using in-depth semi-structured interviews across universities and universities of applied science, Phase I generates rich, contextualised accounts of everyday academic and social life and explores how belonging is shaped by habitus, cultural capital, and institutional practices. Building on these insights, Phase II develops a context-sensitive measurement instrument for university belonging and uses it as the basis for a planned longitudinal, multilevel study that traces belonging over the early years of study and identifies individual, social, and institutional-level factors associated with inequalities in university belonging.

By focusing on how belonging is differentially experienced across various axes of inequlity, the project aims to explain mechanisms that reproduce these patterns of inequality and to identify actionable recommendations for curricula, student support, and institutional policy. The project also responds to wider concerns about equity and completion in higher education and will provide the empirical foundation.