GRADUATION TALK ▼

PRIVATE SCHOOLS IN GERMANY

AN INTERVIEW WITH Pia Akkaya

▐  Pia Akkaya tells us about her thesis on the private school system in Germany, her time at BAGSS as well as her plans for the future. 

   // What drew you to the topic of your dissertation and what interests you most about it?
 

   P.A. During my studies I realized that we know why families choose private schools and how students perform at them – but we knew almost nothing about the characteristics of German private schools. For example, the German basic law states that private schools should not segregate students by their families’ economic backgrounds. Still, we do not know the amounts of tuition fees or admission fees. Further, we have certain stereotypes in mind when we think about different kinds of private schools. But we lack detailed knowledge on private schools’ characteristics and their systematic differences by sponsorships.

In short: we did not know whether the assumptions about German private schools actually were true. This puzzled me a lot. My aim was to look into the unique features of the German private school system (e.g. private school sponsorships and tuition fees) and analyse their interdependencies with social and regional inequality as well as with the structure of the public school system.      

   // Can you give us a sneak peek into the findings of your thesis?
 

   P.A. I collected data from 814 higher secondary private schools: school sponsorships, school profiles, admission criteria, admission fees, tuition fees, year of foundation. My thesis was explorative in nature. Besides very detailed descriptive results I provided a lot of explorative results from over 30 multiple correspondence analysis and deduced a fair amount of hypotheses. Hence, a sneak peek is rather difficult.

But there is a common thread throughout my thesis: private schools differ systematically by private schools’ sponsorship and by regional social inequality, some of them seem to be much more (socially) exclusive than others. Further research should treat private schools not as a homogeneous category, but differentiate them by private schools’ sponsorships (namely: catholic, protestant, progressive education, international and bilingual, others) and at least by East and West Germany.

   // What did you enjoy most about your time at the Graduate School?
 

   P.A. The ability to focus on my research interests without fitting them into an existing research project and the tremendous support by BAGSS to do so. I am very grateful for all possibilities BAGSS gave me, e.g. concerning research funding, or travel grants. Looking back, I also liked organizing the ABC and co-organizing the IBC, although it might have been stressful at this time. But in terms of actual enjoyment: I liked the community, knowing that everybody is going through the same, sharing ideas and laughs with the others, receiving valid feedback in the colloquia or even while having a coffee, being part of the doctoral student council and standing up for my peers, being part of a doctoral writing group... Without all these social experiences it would have been hard to cope with all the setbacks I experienced while writing my thesis.  

   // What is the next step in your career?
 

   P.A. I learned and accomplished a lot during my time at BAGSS. I had the opportunity to meet and learn from internationally renowned researchers. Next to working on my thesis, I gained teaching experiences and was invited to be part of a research project at the Berlin Social Science Centre.

Still retrospectively, I think my experiences in academia could not meet my expectations. I liked being a scientist, but for me research just was not enough, and I was too impatient. I identify as sociologist and still it frustrates me to see all the social inequality in society. I want my work to have an impact on people’s lives and at least get a slim chance at reducing the effects of social inequality. I did not feel I could reach this goal inside academia, or at least not as soon as I would have hoped for.

So, in late 2018 I decided with a heavy heart to not pursue an academic career after all and to try being a sociologist outside academia. I left BAGSS at the end of 2019, started a job in January 2020 and finished my thesis next to it. I do not regret this choice, I am very delighted with my current position. But I also do not regret writing a thesis and being part of the BAGSS community. I would not want to miss any of it!

Image Credits: © Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences