Social and Demographic Factors with Influence on the Educational Status of Romanian Youth

In Romania the high education has undergone a spectacular expansion after the fall of the communist system. The relative easy access to high education combined with a high rate of unemployment among youth (24.3%, Sandu et al, 2014), lead young people to increase their chances on the job market by aspiring to tertiary education (Hatos, 2006). These aspirations often are unrealistic: 80% of high school students in their final school year from a nationally representative sample surveyed in 2012 declared that they want to continue education, when the graduation rate from high-school was about 60-70% or even lower in the last 3 years. In addition, the recent PISA results had shown that the Romanian high school students were among the most unmotivated in the sample, the rate of truancy being very high, all this reflecting the gap between aspirations and attitude to school, called “no penalty beliefs” by Rosenbaum and Jones (2006).

In this context the objective of this study is twofold : (1) to see if the school related variables (GPA in the final school year, the school deviancy and the school engagement) are related to the actual educational status of the the youth, and (2) what factors influence the young people's decisions to continue education and what specialization to choose. The study will consider the type of high school – theoretical, vocational or technical - graduated by youth, as well as the effect of demographic factors (socioeconomic background, residential area and gender).

The data were collected in the frame of the project "Outcomes of Adolescence. A longitudinal perspective", being realized two waves of survey (the first in 2012, the second in 2014), from a nationally representative sample of 3508 youth in the first wave obtaining a data base of 1509 respondents in the second wave.