Comment: Could vocational education save Romania’s high school grads from unemployment?
Dana Tudose – Tianu writes about vocational education and how much is left from Romania’s vocational workers compared to the 19th century.
Romania Insider · Journalist
· Updated · 4 min read
Dana Tudose – Tianu writes about vocational education and how much is left from Romania’s vocational workers compared to the 19th century.
Youth unemployment in Romania is, according to a 2018 Eurostat data release, among top 10 highest E.U. unemployment rates for the 15-25 age category. One in six Romanians in this age group does not work nor study.
This year, we just on January 24 the 1859 Unification. Only 6 short years after that historical moment, in 1866, Romania's population was 4.4 million (compared to 20 million today). The most populated areas were around capital city, Bucharest, and cultural metropolis, Iasi. There were 141,754 people living in Bucharest and 90,236 in Iasi. Now for the real treat - here's what jobs Romanians had 150 years ago:
Farmers and various agriculture-related jobs: 648,168; Vocational workers(tailors, carpenters, shoemakers etc.)- 50,869;Merchants(what, today, we would call small business owners): 30,417; Apprentices: 23,192; Public workers: 22,811; Priests: 9,702; Professors: 6,066; Monks: 4,672; Nuns: 4,078; Belle-Arte: 2,156; Lawyers: 318; Doctors: 272; Doulas: 204; Surgeons: 151; Pharmacists: 95.
Today, with a population of 20 million, Romania has 170,000 public workers, 21,000 lawyers (members of the Romanian Bar Association) and 20,648 doctors working in 396 hospitals! However, where doctors are concerned, Romania ranks at the bottom of the list among the EU states.
Romania lost its valuable vocational (professional) workers strata after 1990, when everybody wanted to go to college.
The top 5 E.U. countries with the lowest unemployment rate among young people under the age of 25 are Malta, Germany, Estonia, Netherlands and Czech Republic, with unemployment rates varying between 4.8% and 7.6%.
But the real success story in youth unemployment was and still remains Switzerland, averaging 3.49% unemployment rate between 2000 and 2018.
What does Switzerland do to bring and keep its high school grads in the workforce, making a decent living?
In opposition to most other capitalist countries, today, in Switzerland, only 30% of high school graduates go on to college, while 70% follow vocational studies and become professional workers with various specialties.
The structure of society most often reflects the most important categories and types of work performed in one's country, or culture.
We complain that the middle class is disappearing slowly, but we fail to look at our society from the anthropological perspective rather than from the economic perspective. What is today's appetite, among young people, for becoming tailors, nurses, electricians, potters, mechanics, hairdressers, shoemakers, plumbers, construction workers?
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