TREE2 Results: The First Two Years

Abstract

It has been five years since TREE’s second school leavers’ cohort (TREE2) was launched, thus ex-tending the study towards a replicative multi-cohort design. In early 2021, data from TREE2’s baseline survey (2016) and panel waves 1 and 2 (2017/2018) were published for the use by the scien-tific community. The findings of the present paper draw on this data release, thereby providing an initial overview of mostly descriptive results pertaining to the cohort’s crucial transition from lower to upper-secondary education. Beyond the most salient descriptive results of the cohort’s trajectories in its first two post-compulsory years, the paper provides a synoptic comparison with the first TREE cohort (TREE1), which made the same transition 16 years earlier (2000-2002). In a second step, descriptive findings are complemented by multivariate analyses which aim at disclosing major mechanisms underlying this crucial transition in adolescents’ educational pathways. In doing so, a particular focus lies on the role of skills, achievement and the pronounced tracking at the lower-secondary level of education that characterises the Swiss education system. The paper concludes with a summary and an outlook on further research questions raised by our first findings.