BREAKTHROUGHS IN THE TRANSITION FROM SECONDARY EDUCATION TO HIGHER EDUCATION: DOES THE LABOUR MARKET RESPOND TO ALL FAILURES?

Abstract

The decrease in the flow of students from Secondary to Higher Education which has been seen in Portugal, has been attributed by policy-makers to the attraction of the labour market for young people who should be continuing their studies.Several other reasons, which are generally missing in the official discourse, combine to create this decrease, including the role played by the State's social action policy for Higher Education, the ongoing effects of the economic crisis on families’ incomes, the level of schooling of the parents and mothers of students, among others. In addition to this set of potential explanatory causes, according to economic analyses, other psychological and sociological factors exist, which are often silenced, but which should nevertheless also be considered to achieve a thorough understanding of the dynamics of flows from Secondary to Higher Education. These factors include the motivation, commitment and self-efficiency of students.Previous case studies of Higher Education institutions in Portugal have highlighted the relative influence of a set of factors such as those mentioned above, which leads us to defend the need for an integrated and strategic approach to these factors. This study starts with a macroeconomic and social approach, using comparative education methodology, to obtain a characterisation of the relative position of Portugal with regards to the average indicators of the above-mentioned factors (Bray et al., 2007). This approach is described in this paper, where the main result is expected to be the conclusion that, among various factors, which include the inadequacy of public policies, the decisive factors for the decline in the flow of transition to Higher Education in Portugal are economic ones and access to income, despite the fact that the current legislature of the Socialist Government, which began in 2015, proposes to develop and implement measures designed to favour this transition.The identification of these effects, which have not been diminished or even aggravated by the present legislature, can be used to for the future conception of an analytical instrument of individual and longitudinal information found in a database of a Portuguese Higher Education institution, which will be developed during a second stage of this analysis.