Drawing on three large datasets from the German Higher Education Information System Institute (HIS) from 1990, 1994 and 1999, the study reveals that Turkish youth are considerably more likely than Germans to enter tertiary education. This result sharply contrasts with findings on the Turks' poor performance in primary and secondary school. The higher propensity for tertiary education among Turks can, to some degree, be explained by their lack of familiarity with the German system of dual vocational training and their educational motivation. Another important finding is that among those who enter higher education students of Turkish origin choose, more often than Germans, academically oriented universities rather than the lower-tier applied science universities. This is mainly due to the selection of more traditional fields offered at universities by Turkish young adults. Our results indicate that the educational decisions of these students after the Abitur by no means contribute to the established pattern of ethnic disadvantages in educational attainment in Germany.

This study focuses on school choice processes and how they contribute to ethnic school segregation. The starting point is a heuristic framework on school selection decisions with a sequence of three stages: the perception of school alternatives, the evaluation of these alternatives, and eventually school access. In a step-by-step investigation of these stages, different mechanisms that may account for ethnic differences in school choice are discussed. The empirical assessment is based on a school choice survey on primary school selections in families of Turkish and German origin in the German city of Essen. The results reveal that, from the district schools available, Turkish children are more likely than German children to enter a school with a relatively larger proportion of foreign nationals, a pattern that in the aggregate seems to contribute to an increasing ethnic separation at the school level. Rather than originating from ethnic differences in evaluation or school access, the parent perception is of primary importance. Because of their unfamiliarity with Essen's elementary system, Turkish families frequently pay attention to only a single school. The option they consider is typically the one that accommodates more foreign nationals than the alternative district school.