Education Matters, but Who Can Attain It? Attitudes towards Education and Educational Attainment in Estonia

Education is one of the most important determinants of socio-economic success in modern societies, but educational inequality remains an important societal problem. The aim of this study was to look at public attitudes towards the value of education and views on the opportunities to access education in Estonia. Using data from the Estonian Social Equality and Inequality Study (2010), the findings of the current study suggested that education is highly valued in Estonia, but the public also tends to think that access to education is not equally available to everybody. Furthermore, we found that there is a social-status-based structure in the views of the value of education and access to education. Lower social status groups tend to value education as less important for success in life, and these lower social status groups are also more likely to think that chances to access higher education are not equal for everybody, but that wealth, gender, ethnicity and social status matter. Similarly, inequality of opportunity is also felt more strongly within the ethnic minority group, the non-Estonians, than it is amongst Estonians

Education Matters, but Who Can Attain It? Attitudes towards Education and Educational Attainment in Estonia

Education is one of the most important determinants of socio-economic success in modern societies, but educational inequality remains an important societal problem. The aim of this study was to look at public attitudes towards the value of education and views on the opportunities to access education in Estonia. Using data from the Estonian Social Equality and Inequality Study (2010), the findings of the current study suggested that education is highly valued in Estonia, but the public also tends to think that access to education is not equally available to everybody. Furthermore, we found that there is a social-status-based structure in the views of the value of education and access to education. Lower social status groups tend to value education as less important for success in life, and these lower social status groups are also more likely to think that chances to access higher education are not equal for everybody, but that wealth, gender, ethnicity and social status matter. Similarly, inequality of opportunity is also felt more strongly within the ethnic minority group, the non-Estonians, than it is amongst Estonians

Youth Labour Market in Central and Eastern Europe

Getting a foothold in the labour market (LM) represents a significant shift in young adulthood – labour market entry process affects further careers and tends to relate closely to transitions in other life domains (Kieselbach et al. 2001). However, life course is not anymore a predetermined sequence of first leaving school and then entering work, but rather a series of different activities where youth is growingly exposed to the phases of unemployment or jobs with precarious contract conditions which call for a dynamic view. Previous literature, focusing mostly on school-to-work transition in the Western societies, has established that individual agency is shaped by various institutional factors (Breen 2005): (1) education system, which determines the link and the pathways between the education system and the labour market; (2) the employment systems (employment protection), which shape the contractual possibilities of the youth entering labour market; and (3) the employment policies, which define and shape the possibilities to (re-)enter labour market through various measures, programmes, subsidies, trainings or benefits targeted at youth. The current chapter aims at providing a comprehensive review of the youth labour market issues specific to countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The first part of the chapter presents an analytical framework how institutions frame the transitions outlining also transition regimes. Thereafter, it provides an overview of existing institutions relevant for youth labour markets and their variation across the CEE countries. In the second part, we offer a descriptive analysis of the microdata from the EU statistics on income and living conditions (EU-SILC) datasets, both with time dynamics and in comparison with selected EU benchmark countries – Finland, Austria, the UK and Italy – representing different transition regimes. In particular, we focus on labour market transitions of youth with different educational resources

Proposal for future research based on EXCEPT project.

The aim of this working paper is to highlight unsolved issues and empirical data problems that were identified by the EXCEPT research consortium. Against this background new ideas for future research (including new data collections and ideas for policy evaluation) are presented that have been developed by the EXCEPT consortium