Rising Above or Lagging Behind? Inequality in Higher Education in the U.S. and Germany

Prof. Dr. Marita Jacob is a Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences (WiSo) at the University of Cologne and is actively involved in the WiSo-Key Research Initiative Demography and Social Inequality. Additionally, she serves as the Vice Dean for Academic Careers at the Faculty. After her studies in social sciences, mathematics, and economics, she worked as a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and received her PhD at the Free University of Berlin. She then continued as a Postdoc at the Institute for Employment Research in Nuremberg. Before joining the University of Cologne, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Mannheim. The research of Marita Jacob focuses on social inequalities in education, employment, and family dynamics. She is particularly interested in how factors such as family background, gender, and ethnic origin influence educational decisions, with a recent emphasis on strategies to mitigate social inequalities in higher education. Her work also explores the relationship between gender equality in the labor market and family dynamics. In her latest research on enrollment disparities, she examined how intensive counseling can help reduce social inequalities in enrollment, specifically among native and immigrant students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. She also investigated the role of gendered risk and return preferences and gender differences in the choice of academic majors in higher education.  

Prof. Dr. Claudia Buchmann is a College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor in Sociology at The Ohio State University. She is internationally known for her research on gender inequalities in education, with a focus on how women have come to attain more education than men in much of the world today. Her award-winning book The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What it Means for American Schools (2013, Russell Sage Foundation). Her prior research includes cross-national and comparative studies of the impact of economic policies and educational systems on educational outcomes and social well-being as well as case studies of stratification and mobility in Africa. A theme uniting her varied research projects is a concern for the intersection of institutional factors with family- and individual-level processes in determining social inequalities. Dr. Buchmann’s influential scholarship has been published in many top journals and has received widespread attention from the academic community and the news media, including The New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio and the BBC. She is a recipient of the Joan N. Huber Faculty Fellowship, and her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Spencer Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She has served as deputy editor of the American Sociological Review and on the editorial boards of Sociology of Education and Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. More recently, she served on the advisory board of the Wissenschaft Zentrum Berlin (WZB), Germany and on the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Social Stratification (RC28). Currently Dr. Buchmann is an advisory board member of the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi), Germany. Buchmann received her BA in German from the University of Wisconsin and her PhD in Sociology and African Studies from Indiana University.

Dr. Eva Bosbach is the Executive Director of the University of Cologne New York Office. Born in Prague, she received both her master’s and Ph.D. degree from the University of Cologne. Prior to coming to New York, she was Program Manager at the German Rectors’ Conference in Bonn, Germany, and is author of several comparative studies about doctoral education and the humanities in Germany and the U.S. Dr. Bosbach was awarded NYC Council and NY State Assembly Honorary Citations in 2017 and currently serves on the Boards of the German Centers for Research and Innovation (DWIH) New York and San Francisco. In 2024 she received a special recognition certificate as a partner of the NRW-USA Year 2023/2024.

Christian Strowa assumed the roles of Director of the DWIH New York and Director of the DAAD Regional Office New York in September 2024. He completed his studies in American Studies, Psychology, and Media Studies at the University of Bonn, and pursued Comparative Literature and Philosophy at New York University. Additionally, he holds a postgraduate degree from UCL’s Institute of Education (IoE). He has held teaching roles at Dublin City University and University College London. Before his appointment to New York, he served as Head of Division “Knowledge and Network” at the DAAD’s headquarters in Bonn, where he was responsible for the DAAD’s network of overseas offices, the international DAAD Academy iDA, third party funding and the Centre for International Academic Cooperation KIWi. Prior to this, he led the Section “Scholarship Programmes Asia and the Pacific” and served as Deputy Director of the DAAD’s London Office.

Peter R. Kerrigan is the Deputy Director of the German Academic Exchange Service’s (DAAD) Regional Office in New York office and is the Director of Marketing and Outreach for DAAD in North America. He is responsible for all areas of the marketing of German higher education and research and DAAD’s scholarship programs in the U.S. and Canada. Peter served as Vice President of Membership Development and Services at The Forum on Education Abroad; Assistant Director of the Higher Education Resource Group at the Institute of International Education (IIE); and Senior Program Coordinator in the Work Abroad Division of the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE). Peter is an active speaker in the field of international education and has presented at conferences and workshops around the world. He has served in a variety of volunteer governance positions for the European Association for International Education (EAIE), NAFSA: Association of International Educators, and The Forum on Education Abroad. Currently, he is helping EAIE restructure its mentorship program and serves as the Chair of EAIE’s Social Responsibility Thematic Committee. Peter helped found and grow the Rainbow Scholarship at the Fund for Education Abroad (FEA). This scholarship enables financially disadvantaged LGBTQI students to study abroad.  In September 2016, Peter received EAIE’s Transatlantic Leadership Award. Peter was awarded an M.A. in Political Science by the Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany and a B.A. in Political Science and German by Bates College, Maine, USA.