Institutional and Structural Characteristics of Education Matter: The Influence of Secondary Educational Systems on How Young People Experience Early Job Insecurity

The paper aims to grasp the complexity of the influence of secondary education on young people’s life trajectories by studying simultaneously the effects of individual’s and systemic characteristics of education on how young people experience early job insecurity during the transition from school to employment. The analysis is based on individual-level data from the 2009 Ad Hoc Module of the European LFS on ‘Entry of young people into the labour market’, the ESS R5 rotating module on ‘Work, Family & Wellbeing’ (2010/2011), and country-level data from the official statistics and applies a multilevel modelling technique.

At theoretical level, two sets of features of the educational systems which influence are defined: institutional (stratification, vocational preference and standardization) and structural (expansion of education, development of lifelong learning, expenditure on education).

The paper argues that although the countries’ educational systems and graduates’ employability are embedded in the national institutional contexts, the educational characteristics at individual and macro levels have a significant and independent influence on early job insecurity. Thus, the analysis shows that individual levels and specificity of education are a strong predictor of employability across the European countries studied. Considering the institutional characteristics of the educational systems the paper reveals a positive effect of the vocational orientation of educational systems in facilitating early labour market integration. In contrast to previous studies, which have not yet revealed any effect of the standardisation of input and output on experiencing qualification mismatches, the study finds that whereas the standardisation of output decreases early job insecurity, the standardisation of input is associated with increases in early job insecurity. As regards the structural characteristics of educational systems, it seems that in countries that invest more money in education, the levels of early job insecurity index are lower and the odds of young people working part-time jobs decrease.