What Awaits Students After…

Abstract

The article discusses the future employment and post-educational life of college and university students through the “triangle of opinions”: students, parents, and employers. The study examines the influence of students’ educational and labor activities on their perceptions of future professional and working life and how these perceptions match the opinions of parents and employers. The analysis is based on the results of an online survey of college and university students in the Sverdlovsk region (January-February 2021, n = 1 349 and n = 953, respectively), semi-formalized interviews with employers and parents of students (June-October 2021, n = 26 and n = 20, respectively). We investigate students’ perceptions of their future professional and labor activity in the context of their current educational life (educational success, coexistence of education, and employment), their parents’ opinions on the situation in the vocational education, and perspectives on future employment during the pandemic. An essential element of this situation is the employers’ interpretations of predictors of success/failure of college and university graduates in the professional and labor sphere. The hypothesis of the study assumes a nonlinear relationship between educational activities and employment of students and their success/failure in professional work and life.

Acknowledgments. The research was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR), project № 19-29-07016 “Transfer of Human Capital of Educational Communities: From Failure to Success”. The authors express their gratitude to anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.