Sabine Gerhartz-Reiter researches why well-known influencing factors from both the school and extracurricular fields have such varying relevance for individual educational trajectories, and why some students succeed in advancing their education despite numerous risk factors, while others with similar starting points prematurely drop out of their formal education. The results provide explanatory patterns for success and failure in formal educational careers. They offer a new perspective for more effective concepts for prevention and intervention. The author has approached this topic through the subjective viewpoints of adults with special educational careers and has reconstructed individual pathways that were analyzed in the context of societal structures.