Human Capital for a Planned Economy Relations of Correspondence and Unintended Consequences in the Higher Education of Communist Romania

• Authors: Lazăr Vlăsceanu , Marian-Gabriel Hâncean
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Our main purpose was to look into the correspondence relation between the macro-level normative planning within higher education (implemented by the Romanian communist state) and the de facto micro-level occupational mobility of higher education graduates. We unraveled a consistent lack of correspondence between higher education graduates’ flows and economic production, split on different areas (i.e. industry, agriculture, services). In this light, the production of services significantly increased during communism, given an insignificant oscillation in the number of specialists in services, and in spite of the state’s priority to support industrial production by sustaining large numbers of technical higher education graduates. Identifying time series data on education, population and economy, we explored trends from cross national (i.e. Romania in the context of the Eastern Communist Block) and cross topic (i.e. education, demography and economy) perspectives. We used regression equations to estimate linear trends, the Dickey-Fuller test for stationary checking, and the original stationary variable differencing for oscillation comparative purposes. Our main finding was that the inflation of technical higher education graduates, triggered by the Romanian communist state to support the industry, backfired an informal individual occupational mobility towards urban areas that offered jobs in the service sector.

Keywords

EN

higher education in communism; Romania; undergraduate flows; planned economy

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: International Review of Social Research
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 4
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 41-60

Dates

published

2014-06-01

online

2015-05-06

Contributors

author

Lazăr Vlăsceanu

• Department of Sociology, University of Bucharest

author

Marian-Gabriel Hâncean

• Department of Sociology, University of Bucharest

References

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Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/irsr-2014-0010