Nicole Tieben

PD Dr. Nicole Tieben is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Sociology within the Faculty of Philosophy at Leibniz University Hannover. She holds an M.A. in Sociology from Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf (2004), a PhD in Social Sciences from Radboud University Nijmegen (2010), and completed her habilitation at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen (2019). She serves as an external affiliate of the LEAD Graduate School & Research Network and Fellow at the Leibniz Center for Science and Society.

Her research examines social inequality through educational and life course trajectories, focusing on:

• Non-linear educational pathways between vocational training and higher education
• Dropout patterns and post-dropout destinations
• Intergenerational transmission of cultural capital
• Quantitative analysis of educational inequalities using longitudinal data (NEPS, PISA)
• Teacher effectiveness in reducing achievement gaps

Her publications demonstrate consistent focus on educational inequality mechanisms, particularly in German contexts, using advanced quantitative methodologies to analyze large-scale panel data. Recent work emphasizes vocational-higher education transitions and social background impacts on educational outcomes.

She supervises Bachelor's and Master's theses on social inequality in education, vocational pathways, and school-to-work transitions. Her research has been funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG) and LEAD Graduate School, examining topics including cultural capital transmission and higher education dropout trajectories.

She leads research groups at LEAD Graduate School and collaborates with Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) and Nordic Institute for Innovation, Research and Education (NIFU).