Tertiary Education Landscape and Labour Market Chances of the Highly Educated in Central and Eastern Europe

In recent decades, there has been an impressive rise in higher education participation among young people in many industrialized countries (Schofer and Meyer, 2005; OECD, 2010). This development has been accompanied by the increased differentiation and marketization of higher education tracks (Arum, Gamoran and Shavit, 2007). Notwithstanding the fact that these processes have been occurring both in Europe and overseas, the experience of Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries seems quite unique. With the transition from socialism to capitalism and the accompanying liberalization of educational policy, within a short period of time post-secondary education expanded and diversified in these countries to levels beyond those observed in the most Western European countries (Kogan, 2008; Noelke and Müller, 2011). As formal barriers on educational choice were lifted, many young men and, particularly, young women increasingly opted for higher education. The expansion and diversification of the traditional university tertiary education has occurred in CEE countries through the reorganization of lengthy diploma programs into sequentially organized Bachelor and Master cycles, the introduction of tuition-based university places, the emergence of private providers, further expansion of part-time educational arrangements and distance learning, and shifts in the demand for specific fields of study. Expansion and diversification also occurred through the growth and establishment of non-university, so-called ‘second-tier’ institutions, such as post-secondary vocational colleges. As a consequence, new lines of social differentiation emerged or intensified between university and non-university types of post-secondary education and across various fields of study, within universities across Bachelor and Master programs, between tuition-based and tuition-free study places, between public and private providers, and between part- and full-time education.

While great strides have been made with respect to understanding the impact of educational expansion, differentiation, and marketization on patterns of social inequality in access to higher education (Arum, Gamoran and Shavit, 2007; Reimer and Jacob, 2010), far less is known about their consequences for the labour market integration of tertiary graduates. Previous school-to-work transition research has mainly focused on the labour market returns along the lines of vertical differentiation of the education system, comparing tertiary graduates with school leavers from other educational levels, or analysed institutional differentiation within secondary education (Shavit and Müller, 1998; Kogan and Müller, 2003; Müller and Gangl, 2003; Wolbers, 2007; Blossfeld et al., 2008), paying less attention to the patterns of stratification within higher education (for notable exceptions see Allen and van der Velden, 2011; Kogan, Noelke and Gebel, 2011). However, the tremendous change in the higher education landscape calls for further empirical investigation. Do new lines of vertical and horizontal differentiation in higher education translate into unequal labour market chances across different groups of tertiary graduates? Do country-specific magnitudes of expansion and diversification lead to different patterns of labour market integration of tertiary graduates? Are various characteristics of tertiary education, i.e. differentiation in terms of program duration, selectivity, or marketization equally important when it comes to the labour market returns? Do male and female graduates display the same job entry patterns, and to what extent can the differences between the two groups be related to the gendered field of study choices? Has incidence of combining work and study increased due to growing labour market uncertainties, and does employment experience during studies have any effect on the speed and the outcomes of transitions from higher education to work? Finally, does incomplete tertiary education pay off in the labour market, and if so, under what circumstances?

The articles collected in this volume address the issue of labour market returns to educational expansion and differentiation, touching on the broad range of research questions mentioned earlier. All the articles focus on the transformation societies of the CEE region, as these countries comprise a variety of higher education configurations, degrees of expansion, differentiation, and marketization, as well as labour market regimes. Pronounced country-level differences invite a comparative perspective to learn about the role of institutions in shaping patterns of social inequality. Although some articles in this collection adhere to larger scale comparisons, others focus on several carefully selected country cases; but in every article, countries are compared to illustrate the relevance of national institutional arrangements for the processes studied. Of methodological note, all articles draw on high-quality, standardized longitudinal, and/or retrospective life history micro-data and use state-of-the-art techniques to capture the dynamics of graduates’ labour market integration.

Although all the articles pertain to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the very same issues have also been motivating social science research and public debate in Western countries. The intention of this collection of articles is hence not only to cover new ground geographically but also to advance an innovative research agenda on the social consequences of expansion and differentiation of higher education. Above all, our aim is to theorize and generalize the findings well beyond the specific cases studied, presenting new ideas, and opening frontiers for further comparative work.

The first article by Clemens Noelke, Michael Gebel, and Irena Kogan analyses how patterns of institutional differentiation in higher education systems are linked to educational inequalities at the transition from higher education to work. The authors argue that institutional differentiation in higher education can be captured by two analytical dimensions, degree level and occupational specificity, which structure the transition from higher education to work in similar ways across the countries studied. Occupational specificity is expected to speed up the transition to first significant employment, whereas degree level should affect the occupational status of the first job. The authors use data from five post-socialist CEE countries—Croatia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Serbia, and Ukraine—to test these hypotheses.

Anna Baranowska-Rataj and Marge Unt examine labour market returns to various study majors in CEE countries, in particular questioning the benefits of studying engineering for early labour market careers. A specific focus of the article is on the effects of the field of study differentiation for the gender stratification. The two countries under comparison, Poland and Estonia, differ in gender relations, with Estonia more favourable towards female labour market careers and Poland more favourable towards more traditional gender roles. Both countries appear alike, however, in terms of the strict rules regulating entry into engineering occupations. The latter institutional characteristic is seen particularly relevant for explaining poorer labour market start among engineering graduates in the CEE countries compared with Western Europe.

In the third article, while acknowledging the paramount importance of vertical differentiation in higher education for graduates’ labour market outcomes, Michael Gebel and Anna Baranowska-Rataj address further diversification elements of Ukrainian and Polish higher education. These relate to the introduction of tuition-fee programs (marketization) and private education providers (privatization). In the expectation that labour market returns to various study programs might be related to these programs’ extent of selectivity, the authors examine the composition of state-funded and tuition-based public and private higher education tracks. In the second step, the authors analyse the labour market outcomes among graduates from various programs using school-leaver data for the early-to-mid 2000s.

In light of the widespread practice among students to combine study and work, Péter Róbert and Ellu Saar examine the extent of this phenomenon and the composition of the student body observed in ‘dual status positions’. Furthermore, the authors analyse the effect of working while studying on early labour market outcomes. The six CEE countries they examine in the study—the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary, Poland, Estonia, and Lithuania—represent a variety of institutional settings with respect to the expansion and marketization of higher education, labour market regimes, and employment protection legislation. These institutional features are said to particularly influence the incidence of ‘dual status positions’ and structure the effects of those on later labour market outcomes.

The final contribution by Teo Matković and Irena Kogan addresses tertiary education dropout, the incidence of which has been growing alongside increasing tertiary education participation. The authors explore the effects of failing to complete a tertiary degree on early labour market careers of youths in Croatia and Serbia. After discussing individual-level mechanisms behind labour market returns to tertiary education graduation versus its incompletion, the authors link them with the institutional conditions of employment systems under which these are more likely to operate. The authors then test the resulting hypotheses by comparing youths’ early labour market outcomes in terms of first job entry dynamics and job quality.

Acknowledgements

The work in this collection of papers started within the international research project on educational systems and labour markets in Central and Eastern Europe, generously supported by the Volkswagen Foundation in 2006 to 2010. The author thanks all participants of the project’s meeting in Paris for their fruitful discussions and the European Sociological Review referees for valuable comments and suggestions.

References