Magyar_Ifjusag_2012_tanulmanykotet

Hungarian Youth 2012III. EducationSzilvia Nyüsti: The current situation in the field of educationAnalysing education-related figures produced by the Hungarian Youth2012, it can be ascertained that educational expansion has seeminglycome to a brink, young people’s paths of schooling have become fracturedand diverse. Qualifications obtainable through certain levels of educationand entry to the labour market have ceased to follow one another linearly.Life paths are now characterised by shorter or longer interruptions andan ever diversifying array of qualifications, employment and foreign experience,which appear in the lives of young people either as alternatives orsimultaneously.The strong correlation between personal background and educationalinequalities are also reflected by the results of the 2012 survey; those witha disadvantageous family background fall behind their middle-class or prosperouscontemporaries at all levels of education and every phase of selection.Serious crises lived through at a young age also have an adverse effecton school careers, with the aggregation of such negative experiences leadingto a greater probability of dropping out from education, failing to enterthe upcoming, higher educational level or admission to a less well-regardedtraining programme. Although the social predetermination of selectionconsistently fades towards higher educational levels, this in fact cannot be,for the most part, attributed to the waning of the effect itself but rather torobust selection in the early phase, which results in an increasingly defecateand homogenous group entering higher educational levels.Although formal qualifications continue to have a strong influence onlabour market positions, Szilvia Nyüsti’s analysis reveals that those with adisprivileged background fail to reach the level of employment enjoyed bytheir middle-class contemporaries even in possession of a higher educationdegree, and their unemployment rates remain above the average level amonggraduates. Even more disappointingly, young graduates with disprivilegedbackgrounds only just reach up to their academically unsuccessful (holdinga vocational qualification at best) peers born into higher sections of societyin terms of employment their employment figures.348