Exploring Student Success in Austrian Higher Education: The Role of Prior Education, Fields of Study, and Student Characteristics

This thesis investigates what shapes students’ success in Austrian higher education. It is partic-ularly concerned with the impact of prior education, differences across fields of study, and individual characteristics that may indicate social inequalities. This objective is approached through a socio-economic and sociological lens by using a mixed method approach, including analyses of register data, survey data, and narrative interviews.
The upper secondary level of the Austrian education system is characterised by a high level of differentiation, with various types of academic and vocational high schools available. These academic and vocational high schools provide access to higher education, yet they differ in terms of their disciplinary focus. In order to analyse the influence of these different school types on students’ success in higher education, the concept of disciplinary counterparts and disciplinary proximity is developed in this thesis. This concept describes school types and fields of study that share the same or a closely-related discipline and is based on theoretical considerations of discipline-specific prior knowledge and disciplinary habitus. For most fields of study, the findings show that students who attended a school that is a disciplinary counterpart to their field of study have a higher probability of graduating than their peers who attended other school types. While the likelihood of graduation is generally higher at universities of applied sciences than at universities, the pattern that students from disciplinary counterpart schools are more likely to graduate have been observed at both types of institutions.
Students who enter higher education through non-traditional access routes such as delayed transition and second-chance education are less likely to graduate from higher education than those with a traditional ‘Matura’ and a direct transition. However, students with non-traditional access are typically older and confronted with different life circumstances than younger stu-dents. These include, for example, working during their studies or having caring responsibili-ties for children. Such external factors limit the time available for studying, thereby prolonging their studies and increasing their risk of dropping out. Furthermore, individual student charac-teristics such as gender, parental education, and migrant background were found to have a sig-nificant impact on the likelihood of success. However, they exert heterogeneous effects, i.e. the direction and magnitude of the effects vary between fields of study. Students with study delays face complex and intertwined problems, which often occur at the start of their studies. These include problems with learning and motivation, but also severe psychological disorders.
The findings particularly emphasise the complex interplay between prior education and higher education, the heterogeneity of fields of study, and the heterogeneity of students, thereby mak-ing an important contribution to future research and to the development of policy measures to enhance student success.