Relations of Correspondence and their Unintended Consequences in Higher Education of Communist Romania (pages 41-60)
Lazăr VLĂSCEANU and Marian-Gabriel HÂNCEAN
Article first published online: 30 June 2014

Keywords: higher education in communism, Romania, flows of students, planned economy.

Abstract. Our major purpose was to inspect the correspondence relation between the macro-level normative planning within higher education (implemented by the Romanian state) and the micro-level de facto occupational mobility of higher education graduates. We unraveled a consistent lack of correspondence between higher education graduates' flows and the economic production, split on different areas (i.e. industrial, agricultural, services). Under this vein, the production of services significantly increased during Communism, given a soft back and forth oscillation in the number of specialists in services and in spite of the state's priority of supporting industrial production by sustaining large numbers of technical higher education graduates. Identifying time series data on education, population and economy, we explored trends from a cross national (i.e. Romania in the context of Eastern Communist Block) and cross topic (i.e. education, demography and economy) perspectives. We used regression equations to estimate linear trends, Dickey-Fuller test for stationary checking and original stationary variable differencing for oscillation comparative purposes. Our main finding was that the inflation of technical higher education graduates, triggered by the Romanian communist state to support the industry, backfired an informal individual occupational mobility towards urban areas that were enclosing jobs within services.

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