Adult Education and Lifelong Learning

The adult stage (Stage 8) of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) focuses on the adult working age population in Germany and serves, in many respects, as a capstone for the NEPS structure. Its main purpose is to collect data from Starting Cohort 6 (SC6, adults) on adult education, specifically on formal, nonformal, and informal further training; on competence endowment and its development over the life course; and on monetary and nonmonetary returns to initial and adult education in a life-course perspective. The data include a large number of theoretically derived determinants of adult education and competencies, as well as information on returns within and outside of the labor market. Detailed information on the learning environments at a workplace or in a household makes it possible to contextualize the returns to education. On the one hand, the SC6 data contain detailed retrospective information on education, labor market participation, and households; on the other hand, they provide yearly panel information from currently ten waves (as of May 2018). These rich data allow numerous analyses from a life-course perspective pertaining to sociological, economic, psychological, and developmental theories.