The current Scientific Use File (doi:10.5157/NEPS:SC4:13.0.0) contains newly added data from the thirteenth wave of the Starting Cohort of ninth-grade students. The field period ranged from October 2020 to May 2021. The survey consisted of a telephone interview (CATI). Students aiming to graduate from high school (Abitur), apprentices in their final year of vocational training and university students were asked to participate in an additional online survey (CAWI). Competency testing did not take place in this survey wave. The Field Report on the website in the section „Documentation“ provides detailed information on the content and the realization of the new survey wave.

With the current release, a critical data error in the spVocTrain dataset has also been corrected. Due to an incorrect assignment within the survey, incorrect values were written into the data as ts15207_g4O “Municipality of training facility (district)” for episodes of a college or university degree (ts15201=7, 8, 9, 10), a doctorate (ts15201=15), or a habilitation (ts15201=16) since the nineth panel wave. The derived variables ts15207_g3O “Municipality of training facility (administrative district)”, ts15207_g2R “Municipality of training facility (federal state)”, and ts15207_g1 “Municipality of training facility (west/east)” were equally affected by this error. Episodes of other types of vocational training (ts15201=1 to 6, 11 to 14, 17) showed no problems in the variables mentioned. Because of this correction, it is strongly recommended to work with the current data when using the variables ts15207*!