Description: The Arbeiter- und Bauern-Fakultäten ("Workers' and Farmers' Colleges"; ABF), existed from 1946 to 1962 in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Their purpose was to enable workers and farmers to pass the Abitur exam, which granted access to higher education in Germany. The program of these institutions harks back to the German labor movement's long-standing demand for equal access to education regardless of social origin. In all, some 35,000 people earned the right to attend university through the ABF.This paper attempts to show, with the historical distance we have today, the problems and opportunities that can be drawn from such a large-scale experiment to extend access to higher education to persons from non-educated backgrounds.State of the art: almost finished research project supported by the German Research Foundation Methodology: The function of the educational institution is reconstructed using a study design that combines multiple perspectives, and both sociological and historical approaches. Data gathering and analytical methods used include:1. Research in all pertinent archives2. Historic reconstruction of biographies 3. Hermeneutic case reconstructions based on narrative life-history interviews with teaching staff and alumni of the ABF (Rosenthal 1995)4. Discourse analysis of the minutes of disciplinary hearings5. Group discussions with ABF alumni6. Statistical analyses, both of historic statistics and of a present-day questionnaire, aimed at detecting changes in social structures Conclusions: In spite of all state subsidies, the following problems appear which will be examined based on the analysis of a follow-up study carried out using a standardized questionnaire:1. There is a correlation between social background and academic success, both at the ABF and in subsequent studies. 2. The fields of study chosen show segregation by class and sex.3. Careers after the completion of academic studies also show patterns that differ by class and sex. Although these theses can be formulated based on quantitative data (primarily archived statistics and follow-up studies), the reasons for these results can only be shown through the inclusion of qualitative material. Based mainly on the analysis of narrative biographical interviews with ABF graduates, we can reconstruct three types of educational biographies:Type 1: the bourgeois or petit-bourgeois career strategist.Type 2: the upwardly-mobile proletarian.Type 3: the heteronomously produced student.The ABF has a different biographcal significance for each of these types. Accordingly, each type developed very different learning strategies and career projects. A detailed examination of this typology will show the following: 1. How the socio-cultural mechanisms (in Bourdieu's terms, the importance of cultural and social capital) remained in force in East Germany, despite official propaganda to the contrary, and were loosened only to a limited extent.2. What conditions are necessary for the successful educational advancement of a clientèle from a non-educated background; in other words, what biographical and political limitations work against and what factors are favorable to such advancement.3. What biographical strategies are developed by persons from educated families (that is, children of "other" social backgrounds) in order to follow their family's traditional educational path under political structures that drastically restrict their opportunities.Thus a historical view of such a "large-scale experiment in educational policy," combining diverse methodolgical traditions, allows us to pursue the relationship between education and social inequality in the sequentiality of its genesis, development and variation.