Cohort approach on educational data of the Czech Republic: Massification of tertiary education and its impact on education attainment
Abstract
At the beginning of the new millennium the European Union started to emphasize extremely the knowledge‐based economy. One of the aims of the Education and Training 2020 strategy is to reach 40 % of population with tertiary education attainment.
Especially in the European post‐communist countries the development of the tertiary education sector has been really rapid in the recent years. These changes are usually accelerated by specific demographic development in those countries.
Based on Martin Trow´s concept of the massification of tertiary education we analyzed the changes of the tertiary education sector in the Czech Republic using the period (transversal) and especially cohort perspective. According to Trow, it is impossible to maintain the elite system structures for the development of the mass education, and the same holds for transition between mass and universal education ‐ so it is very important for policy makers to know in which phase the system is.
Analyses shows that Czech tertiary education system changed from elite to mass in the early 90s, and from mass to universal in the beginning of the 2000s. Applying the extrapolation method on tertiary education as well as on upper secondary education data, we are able to construct a robust multi‐state model for estimating education attainment of the population aged 25 years and over to the year 2050.
The results are very important for other specific demographic analyses where education attainment as an explaining variable can be one of the key factors (fertility, mortality, migration, health status, etc.).