>To what extent the practice of paying more to workers, in relation
>to people with higher education discouraged people to go to the
>universities? Why to spend 4-6 years more in a university to earn
>30% of a factory worker? I´m not talking about abstract notions of
>fairness but about the role of personal incentives in a socialist
>economy. To what extent this practice wasn´t part of a broader
>economic policy bias toward heavy industry that may have contributed
>to the failure in the transition to a IT based economy?
***** Social Forces 82.1 (2003) 241-276 Loosening Links? School-to-Work Transitions and Institutional Change in Russia since 1970* Theodore P. Gerber University of Wisconsin-Madison
. . . [A]lthough in absolute terms the proportion of Soviet Russians receiving tertiary degrees was lower than in the West, by the late 1970s the educational system was "overproducing" specialists (Connor 1991; Zaslavsky 1982). Declining growth and low levels of technological progress meant that the economy's need for highly educated specialists increased slowly, if at all. Yet the educational system continued to produce new university graduates at a steady rate. The overproduction of specialists could be expected to reduce the EC association [the association between education and first occupational class], because it leads to a situation where there may not be enough professional jobs to accommodate all VUZ graduates. The rate of overproduction appears to have increased during the 1970s and early 1980s then stabilized thereafter.
. . . Recognizing that the economy needed more manual workers - particularly skilled manual workers - rather than experts, the regime steadily diminished the pay differential separating manual and nonmanual workers during the course of the 1970s (Flakierski 1993). By the start of the Gorbachev era, professionals earned less on average than skilled manual workers and barely more than unskilled manual workers in industry. This removed an important incentive - though by no means the only incentive - for entering professional or technical work. Accordingly, it may have had the effect of reducing the EC association, if VUZ [tertiary institution] graduates and, to an even greater extent, SSUZ [specialized secondary school] graduates (whose technical occupations usually paid even less) sought to avoid their assignments in order to obtain more lucrative jobs as skilled manual workers. . . .
. . . The Russian labor market has contracted dramatically since the collapse of the Soviet system (Gerber 2002b), and the impact of this contraction on potential labor force entrants may vary by their education. The analyses cannot readily be expanded to incorporate non-employment as a destination category even though the data indicate when a respondent has never been employed since completing schooling. The never-employed rate grew from 4.1% in the 1978-85 graduation cohort to 9.4% in the 1985-91 cohort to 17.3% in the 1992-2000 cohort. But the meaning of "never employed" differs for a respondent who graduated in, say, 1975 and for a respondent who graduated in 1992. In the former case nonemployment most likely reflects a decision not to work or a physical infirmity; in the latter, it probably indicates difficulty finding work. In fact, the data show no significant change over time in the effects of educational origin on the odds of being "never employed," implying that the tightening of the labor market at first entry has affected all educational groups proportionately. 16 Thus, while institutional change arguably increased the difficulty of finding a job for new entrants to the labor force, it did not thereby influence stratification in first job opportunities based on educational attainment. . . .
If institutional changes cannot explain the variation in the EC association in Russia from the 1970s through the 1990s, then what can? Here we are on less certain ground. One possibility - suggested though hardly proved by the empirical findings - is that structural changes in the economy and society (affecting, for example, the ratio of VUZ and SSUZ degree holders to the effective demand for highly specialized labor) and specific policies shaping the structure of incentives for different courses of action (e.g., wage compression across classes in the Soviet 1970s) played an important role. As larger numbers of Russians completed secondary education in the decades following the World War II, the effective demand for higher education outpaced the country's needs for VUZ-educated experts. In effect, the educational bottleneck detected by Gerber and Hout (1995) beginning in the mid-1960s was followed by a labor market entry bottleneck in the mid-1970s: as the Soviet economy began to slow, it could not produce enough new "slots" for experts and technicians to keep pace with the growing numbers of VUZ and SSUZ graduates.
Wage compression was a policy response on the part of the authorities to the growing qualification mismatch in the 1970s. By raising the relative wages of skilled workers and lowering those of experts, they sought to direct Russian students away from universities and into lower vocational institutions by manipulating wage incentives. But lower wages for expert workers also diminished the incentives for those assigned undesirable expert jobs to actually report to their jobs. Thus, the structural pressure for lower EC association based on the oversupply of VUZ and SSUZ graduates was supplemented by the policies the Soviet regime adopted in an attempt to deal with the structural imbalance. . . .
* The author acknowledges financial support for data collection, analysis, and writing from a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation postdoctoral fellowship. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Faculty Seminar on Social and Economic Organization, Stanford University, April 2001, the semiannual meeting of the Research Committee on Social Stratification (RC 28) of the International Sociological Association, Mannheim, Germany, May 2001, and the annual Academic Conference of the Program on New Approaches to Russian Security, University of Washington, April 2002. Richard Breen, Ronald Breiger, Sarah Mendelson, Andrew Walder, and two anonymous reviewers provided helpful advice and comments. Direct correspondence to Theodore P. Gerber, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, 8128 Social Science Building, 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI 53705. E-mail: tgerber at ssc.wisc.edu.
Endnotes . . .
9. Economic growth - a crude proxy for changes in the demand for specialists - was far outstipped by growth in the number of specialists during the 1970s and 1980s. According to one estimate, the Soviet economy grew at average annual rates of 3.2% from 1971-75, 1.0% from 1976-80, and 0.6% from 1981-85 (Selyunin & Khanin 1987, as cited by Aslund [1995, p.43]). Meanwhile, the percentage of the over-14 Russian population with VUZ degrees grew at average annual rates of 6.8% from 1970 to 1979 and 3.9% from 1980 to 1989 (calculated from Goskomstat Rossii 1995:10). . . .
References . . .
Aslund, Anders. 1995. How Russia Became a Market Economy. Brookings Institution. . . .
Connor, Walter. 1991. The Accidental Proletariat: Workers, Politics, and Crisis in Gorbachev's Russia. Columbia University Press. . . .
Flakierski, Henryk. 1993. Income Inequalities in the Former Soviet Union and Its Republics. M.E. Sharpe. . . .
. . . [Gerber, Theodore P.] 2000b. "Educational Stratification in Contemporary Russia: Stability and Change in the Face of Economic and Institutional Crisis." Sociology of Education 73:219-46. . . .
Gerber, Theodore P., and Michael Hout. 1995. "Educational Stratification in Russia during the Soviet Period." American Journal of Sociology 101:611-60. . . .
Goskomstat Rossii [The State Statistical Committee of the Russian Federation]. 1995. Obrazovanie v Rossiiskoi Federatsii [Education in the Russian Federation]. Moscow: Goskomstat. . . .
Selyunin, Vasily, and Grigory Khanin. 1987. "Cunning Figures." Novy Mir 63:194-95.
Zaslavsky, Viktor. 1982. The Neo-Stalinist State. M.E. Sharpe. . . .
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