Andrea Forster

Dr. Andrea Forster is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair for Empirical Educational and Higher Education Research within the Department of Education and Psychology at Freie Universität Berlin, where she has been working since May 2021 on the ABBA-II project examining study dropout and career prospects.

Education:

• PhD in Social Sciences from Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), University of Amsterdam (2021)
• Social Sciences studies in Munich and Amsterdam

Research Interests:

Her research focuses on understanding and analyzing social mobility patterns, educational inequalities, and the transition from school to work. She employs quantitative methods of empirical social research to conduct comparative studies of educational systems across different countries.

Her work particularly examines how educational institutions create and perpetuate inequalities, investigating factors such as parental knowledge of educational systems, vocational education pathways, and heterogeneous returns to higher education across different national contexts.

Publication Trends:

Her recent publications demonstrate a consistent focus on educational stratification and inequality, with particular emphasis on comparative analysis between educational systems in different countries (notably the US and Netherlands). Her research spans from examining vocational education impacts across the life course to analyzing how parental knowledge influences student success, showing a trajectory from doctoral work through postdoctoral research.

Research Projects:

• ABBA-II project: "Study dropout and career prospects. Experimental studies on integration in the labor and training market" (2021-present)
• Transnational research on educational inequalities at Universiteit van Amsterdam (2015-2021)

Previous Affiliations:

From 2015 to 2021, she served as a doctoral and later post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology at Universiteit van Amsterdam, working under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Herman van de Werfhorst on transnational research into educational inequalities.