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It is a well-established finding in the literature that immigrants make ambitious educational choices. Once controlling for prior achievement and socioeconomic status, children of immigrants are more likely than natives to switch to the more demanding educational tracks. However, less is known about whether immigrants can actually benefit from these optimistic choices in terms of educational attainment or whether they have a higher risk of dropping out from the more demanding tracks. By focusing on a representative sample of adolescents with and without immigrant background in Germany, this contribution investigates how enrolment and completion rates change over time—from the end of lower secondary education until the end of upper secondary education—and how this affects ethnic inequalities in educational outcomes. When comparing academic completion rates and academic enrolment rates in grade 9, we observe long-term improvements within the immigrant group as a result of immigrants’ ambitious choices. When comparing both outcomes between natives and immigrants, however, ethnic differences in academic completion rates remain comparable to the disparities in enrolment rates as observed in grade 9.

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Given the controversies surrounding the critical period hypothesis on second-language (L2) learning outcomes, this study focuses on the phonological aspect of language acquisition—the strength of the foreign accent in L2. Drawing on data from a large-scale representative data set on immigrant adolescents in Germany—CILS4EU-DE—we first demonstrate that there is a critical period (CP) up to the age of around 10, after which obtaining oral language skills without a foreign accent becomes less likely. Second, we provide evidence that native-like language skills can be achieved after the CP if certain preconditions related to learning efficiency and language exposure are met. Our analyses indicate that higher cognitive abilities and exposure to a language environment with intensive and manifold contacts with native speakers can compensate for disadvantages caused by a late start in L2 acquisition. The results are discussed in the context of the linguistic and sociological scholarship of language acquisition and immigrant assimilation.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, people perceive their health and finances to be at greater risk than before. Using data from CILS4COVID, an add-on study to the German long-term project CILS4EU-DE, surveying young adults aged 24-26, we show that these risk perceptions are prevalent in populations with a former Yugoslavian, Turkish, and Asian background, although we find only few differences between the German majority and the ethnic minority groups overall. Contrary to expectations, we were not able to fully explain these systematic differences with sociodemographic, experiential and sociocultural factors. Nevertheless, our analysis provides important insights into mechanisms underlying the increased perception of risk during the pandemic irrespective of respondents' ethnic origin.

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