Values and the value system of the youth, using the example of student population

Purpose - The youth (especially students) with their values have major influence on further value system of society in general in the future. Exploring the values and value systems focused on youth, students in the field of economic science are in the interest of this study. Pedagogical interest for the research of values among youth can be double‐natured: the authors want to find out how much students manage to adapt to validity system of a certain society, or they want to find out what values in which youth can bring to future generation as a special group of people. The aim of this research is to find out whether there are differences in the hierarchical values and the value system between the Economics university students from EFST (Croatia) and GUF (Germany) or not. Design/methodology/approach - In order to find out if there are values in general and also a value system of the youth, the research was conducted using questionnaires at Universities in Split and Frankfurt. The questionnaire was constructed based on psychometric Likert‐analytical methods. The collected statistical data are entered and stored in the file of the statistical package SPSS. Findings - The value system of the youth is an important indicator for a specific trend of the society, because young people represent the future backbone of the society. The current situation in society affects the formation of confounding value attitudes to a greater or lesser impact on the actual behavior of young people. Based on obtained results it can be concluded that the Economics students of the University of Split and Frankfurt have a statistically significant difference in the assignment of significance values and the value system as a whole. Originality/value - This study primarily examines the value systems of students who live in very different social environment. Social environment has affected their value system.