Teo Matković Recent Developments in the Education System and School-To
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Recent developments in the education system and school-to-work transitions in Croatia Teo Matković Teo Matković Recent developments in the education system and school-to-work transitions in Croatia Arbeitspapiere – Working Papers Nr. 138, 2010 Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung Teo Matković: Recent developments in the education system and school-to-work transitions in Croatia / Teo Matković – Mannheim : 2010 (Arbeitspapiere - Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung ; 138) ISSN 1437-8574 Not available in book shops. Token fee: € 3,00 Purchase: Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung (MZES), D – 68131 Mannheim WWW: http://www.mzes.uni-mannheim.de Editorial Note: Teo Matković is a PhD candidate in Social Policy at the University of Zagreb, currently employed as a junior lecturer in the Social Policy Chair of the Faculty of Law and research assistant on the project "Social cohesion indicators and development of the Croatian Social Model". His research interests focus on inequalities and policies in spheres of unemployment, employment, and education. His PhD thesis deals with school-to-work transitions in Croatia. During his stay at the MZES, he provided analyses for the Croatian School Leaver Survey. Abstract This paper portrays the transitional developments in the education system, youth labour market and related institutional provisions in Croatia in line with recently published comparative work on transitions from school to work in Europe. The overview is primarily based upon the Croatian Labour force Survey series data ranging from 1996 to 2008. The Croatian education system, based upon its central-European legacy, underwent, through substan- tive expansion in the 1950s and 1960s, a de-tracking experiment in the 1970s and 1980s, and a sub- stantial but unbalanced expansion of its tertiary education since the mid-1990s. The system re- trenched into a rather stratified system with medium standardization and weak employer linkages at the secondary level. In such a setting, coupled with strong employment-protection legislation, recent school-leaver unemployment in Croatia is high relative to general unemployment and tends to decline relatively slowly with labour market experience. Economic growth in the 2000s combined with partial deregulation of the labour market were followed by improved dynamics of entry, but an increase in the precariousness of the initial employment opportunity. Consequently, around 2008, it still took about five years on average for the school-leaver unemployment risk to approach that of the national aver- age. In the Croatian case, its stratified education system leads to stratified labour market outcomes, both with respect to integration into the labour market and job quality. Achieved education level plays a cru- cial role in the school-to-work transition process. Unlike in the occupational labour market (OLM) coun- tries, secondary vocational education in Croatia does not enable smooth transitions or better job reten- tion, making the country pattern more akin to that of Mediterranean countries. Early school leavers and youth with only a general secondary education face the worst outcomes, while tertiary education persistently offers the substantive advantage in terms of labour market integration, job quality, and se- curity. Recent expansion in the number of tertiary graduates coincided with a decline in their job- search advantage, and their initial occupational status tends to be slightly lower, with substantive dif- ferences persisting. Once a job has been found, there is a strong tendency among graduates from each track of education to cluster in particular sectoral and occupational niches, while differences be- tween education tracks and levels in status of achieved jobs are as high in Croatia as they are in OLM countries. Contents 1 Introduction....................................................................................................................................... 1 2 Education system............................................................................................................................. 2 2.1 Overview of the Croatian education-system legacy of 1945–1990.......................................... 2 2.2 The education system after 1990............................................................................................. 4 2.3 Vertical dimension of the education system............................................................................. 7 2.4 Institutional traits of the education system ............................................................................. 10 2.4.1 Stratification and track differentiation................................................................................ 10 2.4.2 Standardisation and quality differentiation........................................................................ 12 2.4.3 Organization of vocational training.................................................................................... 13 3 Structural and institutional setup of the Croatian labour market .................................................... 14 4 Hypotheses .................................................................................................................................... 16 5 Data sources and methodology ..................................................................................................... 18 6 Transitions from school to work ..................................................................................................... 19 6.1 Activity and unemployment .................................................................................................... 20 6.2 Employment structure and job quality.................................................................................... 25 6.3 Precariousness and stability of employment.......................................................................... 28 7 Conclusion...................................................................................................................................... 31 References ............................................................................................................................................ 34 Appendix................................................................................................................................................ 39 Arbeitspapiere - Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung 138 1 Introduction This paper was initially conceived as a catch-up effort, aiming to portray the transitional developments in the Croatian education system, youth labour market and related institutional provisions in a fashion consistent and comparable to the recent major comparative works concerning such school-to-work transitions (Kogan et al., 2008; Kogan and Müller, 2003; Müller and Gangl, 2003). While such a de- scriptive effort provides a necessary background and foundation for further analytical work, the time span and detail of data available within the Croatian Labour force Survey (LFS) allowed for a more analytical approach in this paper. Therefore, this article will aim to position institutional structure and school-to-work transition patterns in Croatia within the contemporary findings for other European coun- tries, while exploring the fitness of the prominent theoretical concepts with respect to the observed de- velopments. The first section of the paper outlines the education system of Croatia and describes its historical roots since the middle of the 20th century. The educational system receives detailed attention in this paper as there are no external resources that provide comprehensive information about all the elements of the education system in Croatia (some institutional reports exist in Duke et al., 2008; ETF, 2006; Jafarov and Gunnarsson, 2008; OECD, 2001). The section loosely follows the structure laid out in Europe Enlarged (Kogan et al., 2008), while figures follow the templates provided in the education chapter of Transitions from Education to Work in Europe (Müller and Wolbers, 2003). It starts with a description of institutional heritage. Next, the main tracks and levels in the contemporary Croatian education system are introduced and the dynamics of expansion and vertical structuring of education among recent cohorts are described. This is followed by a discussion focusing on aspects of stratifica- tion, standardization, vocational specificity, and linkages of the education system at secondary and tertiary level. The second section briefly lays out the structural and institutional dimensions of the labour market, as there is an adequate amount of literature discussing the contemporary Croatian labour market (Cazes and Nesporova, 2004; Crnković-Pozaić, 2007; Franičević, 2008; Matković and Šošić, 2007; Rut- kowski, 2003; Šošić, 2005). The third section lays out the hypotheses for school-to-work transition outcomes based on commonly used concepts and observed dynamics of the education system and labour market. The fourth part specifies the Croatian LFS dataset, target population, variables, and methods used in the analysis. The final section turns towards the description and analytical observation of the school-to-work transi- tion process for Croatian recent school leavers between 1996 and 2008. It contains three subsections. In the first, activity and unemployment dynamics are observed. The second subsection deals with early career occupational and sectoral destinations. The third explores the patterns of