Croatian Economic Survey, No. 9, 2007.
Izvorni znanstveni članak
Structural Changes in Tertiary Education and Impacts on the Labour Market
Zdenko Babić
Teo Matković
Vedran Šošić
Sažetak
This article aims to analyse the dynamics of the labour market and the Croatian tertiary education system in order to point out key organizational problems within the latter, as well as to offer some possible recommendations for improvements. Competitiveness of the national economy depends mainly on the quality and the development of human capital. The quality of human capital is determined by the quality of the educational system, investments in education and enrolment rates. In a knowledge based economy, the quality of tertiary education system plays an important role. Like graduates in many other countries, Croatian university and college graduates have better jobs with higher wages, higher activity rates, longer careers, lower unemployment rates and better employment prospects. Even though the total student population in Croatia rose by 82 percent between 1990 and 2005, this expansion was dominantly concentrated in the field of social sciences and humanities, in non-university courses and among students who (partly) pay tuition fees. At the same time, the number of students whose education fees are fully covered by public sources has decreased. Educational infrastructure has not kept pace with this increasing trend, while the proportion of private fees in the total tertiary education cost has exceeded 20 percent in the 2000s. By using aggregate data on employability of university graduates we have observed to which extent publicly financed university entry quotas have followed the changes in labour market demand. By comparing data on recent university graduates from programmes with low and high employability, we have found that publicly financed entry quotas for different faculties were for the most part not in congruence with trends and demands in the labour market, but they were largely the result of a revenue maximization and capacity utilisation strategy, followed mostly by college boards (mainly in the social sciences and humanities), thus creating some disproportion in the highly-educated segment of the Croatian labour market.
Ključne riječi
tertiary education; labour market; employability
Hrčak ID:
11655
URI
Datum izdavanja:
5.4.2007.
Posjeta: 1.736 *