The relationship between Higher Education and labour market in Greece : the weakest link?

The high level of graduate unemployment, even though it is acknowledged as one of the most distinctive characteristics of the Greek labour market, it has not attracted enough attention in the academic literature. This paper utilizes micro-data from the Labour Force Survey in order to investigate how the employment situation of young (aged 35 and below) graduates varies across fields of study. The findings suggest that graduates of disciplines that have high levels of private sector employment, such as Polytechnics and Computer Science, are in general better off in the Greek labour market. On the other hand, graduates of disciplines that are traditionally related to the needs of the public sector, such as Sociology and Humanities, face poor employment prospects. The findings of this study highlight the need for drastic reforms of the Higher Education system

A new location-aware calendar-based application for dynamic minimum path trip planning

The convergence of several trends, including the proliferation of mobile, cloud technologies, social media, and socio-economic trends such as bring your own device, have led to not only the democratization of computing but also to information overload. This creates an opportunity for pattern recognition and ‘Big Data’ technologies to support mobile ‘context-aware’ computing where technology understands human intentions, and effectively ‘disappears’. In this short paper we explore, through the development of an Android-based test application, one of the capabilities of this computing paradigm, which to the best of our knowledge has not been explored. Namely, we explore the complexity of dynamic calendar based minimum path computing

Identifying institutional vulnerability: the importance of language, and system boundaries

Taking the idea that institutional reproduction is not obvious and that institutions are vulnerable has significant conceptual implications. Institutional vulnerability can arise through communication between actors in a common language. To apprehend this requires an elaboration of John Searle's (1995, 2005) argument that language is the fundamental institution. Ontologically, language delineates and circumscribes a community. A community cannot function without a common language, and language at the same time constitutes a community's boundaries, allowing for focused and effective communication within a community. Communication through language introduces ambiguity as well, however, and so institutional reproduction, mediated by language, is a deeply contentious process. Communication across boundaries may particularly "irritate" a system, as Niklas Luhmann has argued. How can institutions then be re-identified through change? Searle's general form for institutions is in need of elaboration. We develop arguments by drawing upon Luhmann's (1995) systems analysis and notion of communication

The mutually reinforcing relation between international migration of highly educated labour force and economic crisis: the case of Greece

Although several studies aim at analysing the causes and impacts of the current economic crisis, especially involving the case of Greece, the role that highly educated population holds has not received wider attention. Based on an examination of both secondary data on the Greek economy/labour market and primary data collected by a survey that included 1821 graduates, this paper shows that underutilization of highly educated population harmed the competitiveness of the Greek economy, a factor which has significantly contributed to the creation of the current debt crisis and fostered the migration of graduates