Ulrike Deppe, Werner Helsper, Reinhard Kreckel, Heinz-Hermann Krüger & Manfred Stock Germany’s hesitant approach to elite education. Stratification processes in German secondary and higher education Specific elite educational institutions have long been absent from the German educational landscape. In the traditional system of primary, secondary and higher education, qualifications of the same type are deemed equivalent, irrespective of where they were acquired. Until recently, for example, doctorate-granting universities, higher education institutions of applied sciences (Fachhochschulen) and traditional secondary schools (Gymnasien) showed no discernible difference in rank. The reason for this ‘fiction of equality’ 1 lies in the specific historical development of German universities and the German school system. The first modern research universities were established in Germany in the nineteenth century as government-run institutions. Modelled on the University of Berlin, which was founded in 1810, they combined research and teaching, thereby autonomously producing the very knowledge upon which academic education was based. Graduation from one of these research universities opened the door to outstanding career positions, particularly in the state apparatus and the professions, and thus to a ‘leadership elite’. The crucial point of access to this system of academic elite formation did not, however, occur with admission to university, but earlier on in secondary education. Here, after the turn of the twentieth century, a structural distinction was drawn between three fundamental types of schools, the Volksschule, the Realschule and the Gymnasium. Only those in possession of a Gymnasium leaving certificate, the ‘Abitur’, were entitled to attend university – any university in Germany. As the decisive link between Gymnasium and university, the Abitur ensured the absence of hierarchies in universities and Gymnasiums, ostensibly at least. The latter saw themselves as prominent educational institutions equipped to train the country’s future elite. Initially the gradual expansion of Gymnasiums and universities did little to change this situation in structural terms, as they managed to preserve their self-perception of creating an elite. During the post-war years, a growing number of university graduates entered an employment system that absorbed the increase without causing a dramatic deterioration in the social standing of its individual members. Those without an Abitur were cut off from the widening avenue of elites, although they did have an alternative in the form of vocational education in the dual education