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Overview of Topics of Doctoral Research for Applicants

Candidates for a BAGSS scholarship need to compose a short research proposal of maximum five pages.

To increase your chances of a successful application, this research proposal should be aligned closely with the academic profile of our Graduate School. BAGSS will only accept topics for which there are suitable supervisors at the School. Below, you find a summary of the research and supervisory expertise at the Graduate School broken down by thematic area ('pillar') and professor.

Some applicants may not have a fully developed proposal yet, but are interested in taking up doctoral studies in the areas of educational attainment, educational choices, the psychological dimension of education or economic returns on education in the labour market. In this case, you may want to consider the exciting opportunities arising from our close cooperation with a number of major research institutions in the region, especially the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi). This Institute is located in Bamberg and maintains a close cooperation with the University of Bamberg and us in the Graduate School. We also maintain a close relationship with the Institute of Employment Research in Nuremberg (IAB), a leading research institute in the area of labour market research, which offers access to important and innovative datasets. More information about the IAB data is available here: fdz.iab.de/en/FDZ_Scope_of_Services.aspx

LIfBi is one of our main external partners. Most importantly for some applicants, it hosts the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), one of the most ambitious social-science projects for the longitudinal analysis of educational trajectories in Germany and internationally.  The data produced by NEPS offer extraordinary opportunities for path-breaking doctoral work on educational trajectories and competence development across the entire life span, supervised by some of the leading principal investigators of the study. If you are interested in a PhD in the sociology of education, psychology with an emphasis on cognition and learning, demography or the economics of education, you may want to consider writing a research proposal based on NEPS data. Research proposals relating to NEPS data are particularly welcome. More information about these data and the design of the study is available here: www.neps-data.de/Mainpage