Prof. Dr. Renate Haas
emeritierte Professorin für Anglistik an der CAU Kiel
veröffentlichte kürzlich den folgenden Beitrag mit Bezug auf Corona zu
Gender Studies
in: ESSE - The European Society for the Study of English
https://essenglish.org/statistics/
Some pre-COVID-19 statistics: research, education, inequality
by Renate Haas
Many experts are agreed that the current pandemic greatly heightens social inequalities. The exact opposite had been one of the motivations for the great education expansion in the second half of the last century. However, even before the lock-downs, the educational opportunities of the lower strata of society left much to be desired. Some findings from Germany may illustrate the status quo ante and encourage comparisons with the readers’ own countries.
According to recent research, before COVID-19 the chances of German children of fathers or mothers with an academic degree to enter university were still over three times higher than those of children from non-academic families. With educational optimism one might perhaps expect that the disadvantages of the latter were finally levelled out over the next steps of the ladder. Yet the gap widened drastically. From about 1 : 3, the ratio of chances opened to roughly 1 : 6 for the master’s degree, 1 : 10 for the doctorate and 1 : 14 for the professorship (Krempkow 2017).