Abstract

AbstractIn the last five years in Romania, a series of measures and policies have been adopted that aimed to increase the enrolment and participation of Romanian citizens in higher education. However, we are still witnessing a decline in the number of students even though Romania has the lowest proportion of graduates (30–34 years) with a higher education diploma in the EU. Through this paper, we will follow the educational path of students in final grades in upper secondary education to analyse how many of them graduated from the national baccalaureate exam and later became students. The data come from the interconnection of two important databases from the Romanian education system, the National Student Register (RMUR) and the Integrated Information System of Education in Romania (SIIIR). Access to higher education must be viewed not only from the perspective of the admissions process but also from the perspective of generational losses that have a direct impact on the human resources eligible for higher education. Thus, we will insist on analysing the “losses” of human capital registered in the national education system in the last year of study in pre-university education, looking at the same time at the characteristics of students who manage to enter higher education. The current analysis is based on the work done within the project “Quality in higher education: internationalization and databases for the development of Romanian education” (code POCU/472/6/8/126766/21.11.2018, implemented by the Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding (UEFISCDI) in partnership with the Ministry of Education (ME).

Highlights

  • The analysis is based on data from the National Student Registry (RMUR) correlated at the individual level with the data from the baccalaureate exam through the Integrated Educational Register (REI), which is a platform that provides access to a person’s educational path by interconnecting the management systems in the educational sector

  • For the students that manage to access an upper secondary institution located in the rural area, data shows that only 26.6% of the students enrolled in the final year of upper secondary education manage to pass the baccalaureate exam

  • Looking at the cohort enrolled in upper secondary education in the final year of study in 2018,10 only 41% managed to access the Romanian higher education system, and 30% managed to be enrolled in the third academic year (2020/2021)

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Summary

Introduction

One of the main challenges European countries face is having a highly-skilled workforce to meet the increasing needs of the economy for professionals, which have increased exponentially in recent years This is especially the case for many Eastern European countries, which already had a low number of higher education graduates even before joining the European Union. These EU members are facing a demographic decline, combined with high emigration rates. The same authors underline how prior academic qualification (educational pathway), student choice and higher education institutions (HEIs) recruitment interact These three actors are affected by regulations, incentives and information campaigns, which are the result of policy (Bemelmans-Videc 1998) (Howlett 2004).

Methodology
The Losses of Human Capital in Romania
Findings
Conclusions and Recommendations

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