Abstract
National and international education reporting primarily captures the expansion of tertiary education through indicators of access, participation, progress, and completion. In this respect, these indicators are indispensable for monitoring and exploring social selectivity and institutional performance; however, they allow only limited conclusions regarding whether formally established educational pathways are in fact accessible, usable, manageable, and available under fair conditions for heterogeneous groups of students. The present study therefore examines the extent to which current educational reporting actually reflects the conditions for substantively meaningful participation in Germany’s tertiary education system. In doing so, this exploratory study methodologically combines an indicator-based secondary analysis of official data with a structuring qualitative document analysis and a critical synthesis of evidence. In terms of content, the interpretation is based on a deductive theoretical triangulation drawing on reproduction and capital theory, the capability approach, socio-technical system and platform perspectives, as well as human-centered design and accessibility governance. The core corpus consists of the 2024 and 2026 Education Reports, the BIBB Data Report 2025, the German-language edition of Education at a Glance 2025, and the corresponding OECD country profile for Germany, as well as supplementary Destatis indicators; peer-reviewed research and normative-technical reference architectures are drawn upon for contextualization. The findings reveal, on the one hand, expansion, internationalization, institutional differentiation, and the growing importance of private and distance learning programs. On the other hand, social background, early dropouts, unequal conversion conditions, and a striking concentration of digital study programs remain significant factors. Above all, digital accessibility, usability, assistive technology compatibility, quality of interaction, accessible exams, algorithmic transparency, and institutional support capacity have not yet been operationalized as a coherent set of indicators. To address this reporting gap, access conditionality is conceptualized through deductive theoretical triangulation as a multidimensional logic of selectivity and integrated into the expanded Tertiary Participation and Accessibility Framework. Through inductive relevance feedback, empirically emerging barriers and previously unanticipated conditions can subsequently be fed back into the framework’s indicator architecture.
Essentially, this study explains why formal participation in education cannot, in and of itself, be equated with substantive participation and how, in practice, participation-oriented educational reporting should be structurally expanded in today’s higher education environment.