The HELM conference is jointly organized by the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) and the IAB. It combines contributions with a general perspective on ‘Higher Education and the Labour Market’, including research on returns to tertiary education, dropout, or graduate placement in the labour market, with contributions on alternating focus topics.
This year’s focus topic is ‘Intended and Unintended Consequences of Higher Education’. Reforms are ubiquitous in higher education and range from small-scale changes or programmes focusing e.g. on facilitating labour market entry or reducing dropout to large-scale reforms such as the Bologna reform. What - independent of their scale - all these reforms share is that their success and overall outcomes are ex ante uncertain. Therefore, it has become widely accepted that the evaluation of such reforms is vital.
Thus, in the part of the conference on this year’s focus topic, we particularly welcome contributions that evaluate such reforms or look at reforms from a methodological perspective. In this context we are particularly interested in:
- Papers evaluating programmes that focus on the transition from secondary school to higher education or from higher education to the labour market. We are interested in both papers focusing on reforms or programmes aimed at increasing the overall success of such transitions (e.g., by promoting university access, reducing dropout, or providing students with skills relevant for labour market success) as well as papers that focus on reforms or programmes aimed at promoting particular aspects during transition processes (such as subject choice).
- Papers evaluating unintended effects of reforms. Independent of a reform’s or programme’s main objective, there might be additional (positive or negative) effects. There is a small but growing literature on this topic, and we particularly welcome papers that focus on such unintended effects.
- Papers focusing on methodological approaches or using innovative methodological approaches to study (potential) reform options. In this context, we are particularly (but not exclusively) interested in control group designs for evaluating ongoing reforms (e.g., through the lagged introduction of reform components for part of the sample, or experiments in which potential components of a reform are introduced to some students as part of a control-group design).