Are there Diverging Time Trends in the Educational Attainment of Nationals and Second Generation Immigrants?

The educational attainment of second generation immigrants is of crucial importance for their subsequent labor market success in Germany. While the schooling outcomes of Germans improved in recent decades, German-born children of immigrants did not partake in this development. The paper applies representative data from the Mikrozensus and the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP) to investigate the development and determinants of educational attainment of immigrant youth. Even after controlling for covariate effects, the time trends in the educational attainment of nationals and second generation immigrants deviate. These different developments over time seem to be related to the changing nationality composition of second generation immigrants in Germany.