Caro Aschemeier lives in two worlds. Her own company in Cologne, that’s her new life. But just get in the car, drive two and a half hours, and boom, the 30-year-old is back to her old life. Aschemeier’s father sold insurance companies, his mother was a housewife and then worked in a factory. Aschemeier herself studied to be a teacher and is now an entrepreneur. Many of her friends and her husband come from academic families. The academic bubble and the simple bourgeoisie, as one might have said in the past – these are the two worlds between which Aschemeier moves again and again.
Almost every fourth person in employment in Germany has a university degree, and the majority has an apprenticeship at the same time. And so there are many who, like Aschemeier, live between two worlds. But to this day there is little awareness that these people experience significant disadvantages. Not only do they have a harder time in the education system, but also in their jobs. This shows a surveyfor which the management consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG) surveyed 1125 professionals from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
The non-academic background remains invisible for a long time
The term “First Generation Professionals” used in the survey is fuzzy, i.e. the first generation in a family to study. Details, such as whether the respondents also had a migration background, remain unclear. Nevertheless, the analysis provides impressive evidence of what education economists say: people from non-academic families often have less information and less access to networks, so they appear less self-confident. Managers, in turn, underestimate how the background limits their employees. All this means that they earn less in the same jobs. It’s called the “class pay gap”. And unlike gender or disabilities, the non-academic background remains invisible for a long time.
Nancy Kracke works at the German Center for Higher Education Research and Science Research on the so-called educational funnel, which scientifically illuminates the phenomenon. She says: “A large part of the inequality is caused by the educational path. People progress through the system unequally.
Caro Aschemeier, 30, is an entrepreneur. The trained teacher founded a learning platform for students.
(Photo: private)
At least that was not the case with Caro Aschemeier. She grew up idyllically, she says. After elementary school in a small town in Ostwestfalen-Lippe, she came to the terraced house with a garden at lunchtime, where her mother did her homework with her. School was easy for her. When all her friends went to secondary school, she was recommended to go to high school, the first in the family. She wanted to study, also to be the first. Her dream job: teacher. “We don’t know who you got that from,” her parents often said of her talent. When she was in high school, she realized that nobody could help her with her homework at home, and her parents would have been overwhelmed. And a degree? An apprenticeship would be enough, was the answer, studying was madness. And expensive. When she was a teenager, the latter became more important. The idyll was in the past, the parents separated, the mother in the factory, the father retired early. The money for school trips had to be saved, the high school year in America was not possible. Those were the smaller things. “It wasn’t tragic for me,” says Aschemeier.
Some study and party, others work
But even then she had an inkling that these differences could cause major problems in the future. At the age of 17 she was at an economic summer camp. Her social sciences teacher advised her to do so. And while everyone came in blouse and tie, she sat there in jeans and a T-shirt. “I just thought to myself: Oh wow, I don’t have a chance to make an impression anyway,” she says. She chatted longer with an entrepreneur, he asked what her parents do. When he heard the answer, he was gone. It was only later that she realized that this must have been a reaction to her origins. “I knew then that I didn’t belong,” she says.
It was a feeling that should carry through. While her friends could concentrate on exams and parties during their studies, Aschemeier worked. Five to seven euros an hour, there was no minimum wage, but the typical balancing act of people from non-academic households: those who have to earn money during their studies find it difficult to do the same work and have less time for unpaid internships. But these are exactly what is decisive for the job – just like the social trappings of the university.
Because once you have arrived on the academic job market, it seems as if everyone has the same starting conditions and only performance matters. In fact, vitamin B has a strong effect at the beginning of a career. “Networks have a very big influence, especially on the job market, where parental contacts often play a role at the beginning,” says Nancy Kracke. So the networking entrepreneur who hasn’t been interested in the factory worker’s daughter is more the rule than the exception.
To this day she thinks, “I’m just an intruder in this brave new world.”
And then there are the aspects that Aschemeier calls the “little things” and that are referred to in research as “implicit knowledge”: How to talk about money in a job interview, what reasonable salaries are, that the essential part of a conference is in the evening takes place in the bar: some people learn the hidden network of rules in the business world from an early age. Others have to learn it like a foreign language. And precisely because people with a non-academic background are often aware of these differences, they appear more insecure. The survey shows that first-time graduates are less sociable on the job and less often have the feeling that they are communicating as equals. In moments like this, Caro Aschemeier still thinks to this day: “I’m just an intruder in this brave new world.”
The fatal thing about these differences: They exist for life. “Non-academic children have a higher probability of pursuing a so-called substandard occupation,” says researcher Kracke. It is one of many reasons why these people often earn less money than their equally qualified colleagues, as a recent British study has shown: The difference there was up to 13 percent. Caro Aschemeier still catches herself asking too little for her work. After her studies she founded a learning platform called Deutschfuchs. That is why she is asked to speak at events. She is sometimes only offered a small fee for this – or none at all. She then thinks, “Hey, now be glad you’re allowed to say anything at all.”
She founded it out of the opposite conviction. She believes that what goes wrong on the labor market can be counteracted by companies and employees alike. This is also a conclusion in the BCG survey. Greater awareness of differences on the part of bosses is therefore helpful, along with mentoring and networking opportunities.
Special mentoring and networking platforms are intended to close the gap
There are now a few of them, “worker’s child” and “network chances” are two well-known ones, a third one: Aufsteiger.org. Stefanie Mattes founded the platform – mainly because she had to clean, model and work as a waitress in order to complete a law degree as the child of two nurses, which got her a job at Siemens. In the early years of her career, when colleagues stood together and raved about her university stays abroad, she was out. Because she wanted it to be easier for others, she brings mentees together with people who are successful in their jobs. She hopes that not only the mentees will learn what skills they still lack for the job. But also on the effects on the mentors from companies. “One of our mentors, for example, is now hiring completely differently. He no longer demands countless internships,” she says. From their point of view, other application procedures would be good for people without an academic background. “It would be best if the classic stages in the CV were not evaluated – but the skills were specifically tested,” she says.
So things have changed a bit on the labor market, but also on a small scale. Today, Caro Aschemeier is self-confident about her origins. But she will never be able to completely shake off the feeling of two worlds. She still gets things like, “Our world isn’t good enough for you,” from her family. She’s scared of everything she says. “Afraid that my family will think of me: they think they are better now.”