Access to higher education during COVID-19: First-generation students in Austria

In Austria, educational upward mobility remains particularly low compared to other European countries, partly due to the prevalence of early tracking. The COVID-19 pandemic caused a severe economic crisis, and numerous measures were applied on the national labour market and in the higher education sector to counteract the negative consequences. In this paper we analyse how existing inequalities in access to higher education for first-generation students (i.e. students with parents without a tertiary degree) have developed in course of the pandemic, drawing on the unique pool of longitudinal register data collected for all Austrian students. We find that in the first year of the pandemic (2020/21), there is a clear peak in the number of students entering higher education in Austria. However, as this increase is mainly due to students with a tertiary family background, the share of first-generation students continued to decrease during this period. It shows that despite the disruptive effects of the pandemic and new labour market and higher education policies, the enduring downward trend in both the total number and the proportion of first-generation students has not been reversed.