Acting and Reacting: Youth's Behavior in Corrupt Educational Settings

Abstract

With its broader employability to the issues of underperformance that may emerge in educational systems internationally, this empirical study redefines and expands Albert Hirschman's theory of voice, exit, and loyalty within higher education. The article formulates a new education-embedded theoretical framework that explains reactionary behaviors of students in corrupt educational systems. The new corruption coping theory defines a set of coping mechanisms that students employ in reaction to failing institutions. Relying on the survey data collected from 762 students and interview-based data from 15 purposely sampled current students or recent graduates of the public higher education institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the study reinterprets the voice mechanism that Hirschman sees as a political tool capable of bringing about change within underperforming institutions as, ironically, severely diminished in its power when observed within a corrupt environment. This research similarly differentiates amongst various types of exit and finds that Bosnian students often react in ways not predicted by Hirschman's model, leading to the emergence of a novel corruption coping theory presented in this study.