Evoluția inegalităților educaționale în România: tranzițiile educaționale ale celor născuți până în 1985 Evolution of Educational Inequalities in Romania: Educational Transitions in People Born Before 1985 Section Studies

Abstract

Postcommunist transition has been the excellent occasion for cvasiexperiments on the impact of large scales of policies aimed at managing social inequalities including those in the field of education. The present article is investigating the dynamics of access to education for several cohort of Romanian citizens born until 1985 by following the expansion of various levels of education but especially of the factors that have influenced the probability of accomplishing a specific educational career using the model of educational transitions. Our study of 4500 Romanian citizens confirms the observations of previous works which, using models of educational transition, recorded the fact that the communist regimes from Central and Eastern Europe did not have any notable and durable performances in leveling of the chances of access to high levels of instruction. Moreover, social inequalities had a significant impact on the probability of graduating from high-school and university in the whole period of time, especially through mechanisms of educational reproduction. Concerning intra-cohort comparisons our data partially confirm the hypothesis of diminishing inequalities during the life-cycle. The analyses presented in this article confirm our expectations regarding the deepening of the inequalities of access for the generation educated during the post-communist period in the cases of all three investigated transitions.