If more and more children attend grammar school and finally achieve their Abitur, this does not necessarily lose its value.

The university entrance qualification is still the prerequisite for access to academic vocational training.

And in every big city there are also differences in ranking between the individual high schools, which are then reflected in higher entry barriers or more demanding subjects.

But the socially integrative expansion of the education system nevertheless forces finer forms of differentiation strategies.

For many parents, maintaining social status is, so to speak, the red line of their children's schooling: If you can no longer move up, then the offspring should by no means fall below the educational level of their parents.

But when more and more members of the same year are pursuing this goal, how do my children show that they are doing it even more than the others?

Where else can you find those subtle differences that show that school alone is not enough?

That there is an unquenched urge for more, for distinction and excellence?

Latin, violin or a year abroad

The sociologists Tim Sawert and Anna Bachsleitner have now used data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to investigate which families actually do this best.

Her surprising finding: It also depends on the grandparents.

Sawert and Bachsleitner were able to access data on 2,599 high school students who were 17 years old at the time of the survey.

They wanted to know if these students did more than others: did they attend a private school?

A humanistic high school?

Were there exchange years abroad?

Did they play sports like fencing, tennis, or hockey?

And did they play a classical musical instrument?

The advantage of the SOEP data is that you can make intergenerational comparisons, since you also have data on the parents and grandparents of the students.

The educational researchers were therefore able to ask whether a continuity in the social status of a high school student's family of origin affects his/her distinctive behavior.

To do this, they differentiated these families according to the length of time they had been in the academic class, allowing them to develop a hierarchy from a non-academic family (neither parent had an academic degree) to a “historically stable academic family” in which at least one of the parents and the grandparents already had academic degrees.

Academic children in the minority

Even the distribution of high school students is revealing: The study asks how the family's academic level of education has continued historically, but this cross-section of today's high school graduates actually shows the high school as being shaped by educational climbers: 54 percent of high school students have no academically educated parents at all .

There are also 12 percent where it was only the grandparents, but not the parents.

22 percent come from a traditional academic household with such educated parents, and only 12 percent have parents and grandparents with an academic degree.

Academic children are a minority among the examined high school students.

However, the results show that the longer the family was academically shaped, the less the children (or their parents) are satisfied with what the grammar school offers everyone.

No, the children from the old academic families want to be different.

They supplement their school activities with extras that are a little more exclusive, almost elitist.

In contrast to them, the pupils without academically educated parents or with only one parent show no particular ambition to work on their academic habitus outside of their Gymnasium.

The fact that they are in it seems to be enough for them.

However, Sawerts and Bachsleitner's study has a problem: it differentiates between high school students only according to the level of education of their parents and grandparents.

Surprisingly, she does not ask about the household income.

It would be obvious that old academic families not only strive for educational gains, but also inherit capital.

After all, exclusive sports, music lessons or stays abroad cost money, not to mention attending expensive private schools.

What is remarkable about the study, however, is that it shows the possibility of a historically arguing sociology.

In any case, the data with the remarkable longitudinal sections that the SOEP draws through German society have long been available.