High Education, Professional Insertion and Economic Development in Romania

Education and professional training play a major part in the progress of the individual and society on the whole, as well as in supplying the qualified human capital each country needs in order to secure its economic growth and prosperity. Although Romania has made significant progress in respect of higher education in the last 25 years in the direction of increasing its number of students and academic majors, the competences and skills acquired by graduates are not always correlated to the market demand, not only at the national level but especially at the European one. Starting from these hypotheses and using an appropriate methodology to identify regional disparities, the authors intend to investigate, reconstitute and forecast the quantitative and qualitative evolution of the tertiary education in the post-communist Romanian system, in the context of a general dynamics disturbed by the continuously decreasing number of the population, by the effects of the selective international labour migration and the recent enforcement of some employment policies in full compliance with the European standards. Based on a set of indicators meant to highlight the degree of integration of graduates on the labour market, our study tries to emphasize not only the segregation level in the labour force market but also the mechanisms that can reduce this discrepancy, as well as the necessity of rethinking the human resource policies in order to adapt them to the new European reality.