Application, financing, orientation during studies and perspectives for a later life – finding your way at colleges, universities of applied sciences, universities or art academies has many levels. In Germany, one factor that determines the success of a course of study is still one’s own background – and thus, among other things, the question of whether one’s parents, for example, or other family members, have studied. If this is not the case, many young people decide against studying in advance, not least because of a lack of information, role models and contact persons. Since 2008, “Arbeiterkind.de” has been working on this form of classist discrimination – at the interface between counseling, motivation, lobbying and information. The non-profit organization is concerned with creating “equal opportunities” between people from academic and non-academic parental homes. The goal is not to place university studies per se above other forms of education and training.
Organized locally, nationwide and partly on a voluntary basis, the organization works as a network – with mentoring offers, information events and its own online platform for networking.
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The content orientation can be cautiously described as pragmatic. Critical, intersectional perspectives, which, for example, take a closer look at the powerful, racist discrimination of families with migration history, are hardly to be found here. Nor does it address people with disabilities, mental illness, or chronic conditions. Neither are critical positions towards neoliberal principles that focus on the restructuring of the European higher education landscape in the course of the Bologna reforms or the economization of educational processes in general.