Effects of tuition fees and socioeconomic background on the educational decision for higher education

As academic education was free of charge for decades, tuition fees were introduced at German universities in 2006. However not all German Lander settled the law and implemented tuition fees at the respective universities. From research perspective this is a nice natural experiment, as the change of costs for an academic study is exogenous. According to RAT-theories of educational decision changing cost should yield impact on class specific educational decision. From this perspective a quasi exogenous variation could be used to test the effect of the cost argument on class specific educational decision. The research hypothesis is, the introduction of tuition fees affected the educational decision going to universities and decreased especially the proportion of students from working class background going to university. Difference in differences analyses confirm a treatment effect in the tuition fee introducing areas of Germany, which is strongest for working class graduates.