Statistical or Taste-Based Discrimination at the Gates of Admission to 5th Grade High School in Germany – Evidence from the Field (Arabic Names)

With regard to the study design, we sent an application via email to all high schools using aliases as parents of prospective 4th-grade graduates—randomized by immigrant background, parental gender, academic performance (with or without a Gymnasium recommendation), and the child’s gender (son or daughter), resulting in a 2×2×2×2 intervention design.

2026-01-15

2026-02-15

The primary outcome variable is responsiveness of the addressed high schools. Responsiveness is measured as follows. If we observe a non-automated response to our treatment email, we mark it as “1”. If we do not observe a non-automated response, we mark it as “0”.
(i) We expect that the overall responsiveness towards inquirers without immigrant background is higher compared to high school's responsiveness towards inquirers with immigrant background.
(ii) We expect that high schools within districts that have a higher share of immigrants answer more frequently to inquirers with an immigrant background than schools in districts that have a low share of immigrants.
(iii) We expect that schools are more responsive to male compared to female inquirers.
(iv) We expect that schools are more responsive to inquirers with high GPA (“Gymnasialempfehlung”) compared to inquirers with low GPA (“keine Gymnasialempfehlung”).

(i) There is evidence that German school administrators respond more frequently to inquiries from families without an immigrant background than to inquiries from families with a migration background.
(ii) We expect to observe similar patterns in the present study, as our earlier nationwide field experiment using Turkish-sounding names already documented substantial ethnic discrimination in school admission responses.
(iii) Building on these prior findings and drawing on insights from gender and migration studies, we hypothesize that families with Arabic-sounding names—who may be perceived as culturally more distant—will face equal or potentially higher levels of discriminatory behavior.
(iv) Independently of ethnic background, responses may also be driven by rational-choice considerations: admission offices have incentives to favor high-GPA students over those with weaker academic profiles.

Apart from responsiveness we are interested in the tonality and the text length of the written answers to the students. We expect that the tonality also varies across the treatment dimensions. This will be an additional variable we will use once we have a sufficient number of observations. In addition, we are interested in categorizing the answers between helpful answers, rejections and other categories that exemplify good, bad or even ugly answer types.
(i) We expect that migrant inquires receive non-helpful answers more often compared to non-migration inquires.
(ii) We expect that that migrant inquires receive neutral or even negative answers more often compared to non-migrant inquires.
(iii) We expect that non-migrant inquirers receive shorter answers compared to migrant inquires because respondents are spending more time to write non-helpful or negative answers compared to positive answers.

All effects are based on rational behavior or cognitive dissonances:
(i) The respondent shows discrimination not by neglect but by choosing a lower effort level.
(ii) The respondent shows discrimination not by neglect but by choosing a lower effort level quality.
(iii) We believe that humans who are intentionally discriminate are aware of this action and justify their behavior by writing longer answers.

This experiment aims to find effects of taste-based discrimination within the German high school system in the responsiveness toward students with and without an immigrant background and with either very good or intermediate grades.
Therefore, we designed an experiment with four binary treatment dimensions on the side of the inquirers who ask high school admission offices about information on how to apply for high school.
We take all high schools of the 16 states in the Federal Republic of Germany into account.
The first treatment dimension is a potential immigrant background of the family. The inquirer’s name signals, from a German point of view, whether the family has an immigrant background or not.
The second dimension is the gender of the inquirer, again signaled by a female or male first name.
The third dimension varies the academic performance of the child, indicating whether there is a Gymnasium recommendation (high GPA) or not (intermediate GPA).
The fourth dimension concerns the gender of the child; the email explicitly states whether the inquiry refers to a son or a daughter.
Each school is contacted via email by one of the sixteen profiles formed by all convex combinations of these four dimensions. We will then observe whether a high school responds to the request and, if so, how much time is required.

Not available

Randomization is done in office by a computer.

State level

Yes

15 clusters with respect to the randomization unit (state level).
16 clusters with respect to treatment clusters (four binary dimensions) within each randomization unit.

Around 3000+, which is the number of High Schools in the 16 States of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Approximately 350+ observations per treatment arm.
High GPA (Gymnasium Recommendation)
1. Immigrant background + Male parent + High GPA + Son
2. Immigrant background + Male parent + High GPA + Daughter
3. Immigrant background + Female parent + High GPA + Son
4. Immigrant background + Female parent + High GPA + Daughter
5. No immigrant background + Male parent + High GPA + Son
6. No immigrant background + Male parent + High GPA + Daughter
7. No immigrant background + Female parent + High GPA + Son
8. No immigrant background + Female parent + High GPA + Daughter
Low GPA (No Gymnasium Recommendation)
9. Immigrant background + Male parent + Low GPA + Son
10. Immigrant background + Male parent + Low GPA + Daughter
11. Immigrant background + Female parent + Low GPA + Son
12. Immigrant background + Female parent + Low GPA + Daughter
13. No immigrant background + Male parent + Low GPA + Son
14. No immigrant background + Male parent + Low GPA + Daughter
15. No immigrant background + Female parent + Low GPA + Son
16. No immigrant background + Female parent + Low GPA + Daughter