Education as a Personal Resource Before and During Transition

Given the age of participants in focus-group discussions conducted as part of the project on "Identity Formation and Social Issues in Estonia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan" (30-49 years), their educational choices were by definition made on the basis of opportunities and limitations of the Soviet educational system. They considered the importance of educational outcomes with regard to the values of the social system and/or the rules of job evaluation under the Soviet state economy. Thus, under Soviet rule:
* In the former Soviet Union, at about age fourteen, people were tracked into three types of educational institutions: general secondary, vocational secondary, and specialized secondary. Because of social divisions among these three main types of secondary education, this selection had a great influence on further educational paths and life-chances of young people.
* A high level of education was a precondition and guarantee for the stability of a quite high status.
* This status, however, was quite inconsistent in terms of income, prestige, and power. The link between education and income was the weakest one.
* The importance of education as a personal resource was mediated by economic and residential structures; this pattern was clearly gendered.

As previous research has shown, the transition to a market economy brought about alteration of the role played by education in structuring society as well as in individual life. Young people consider material returns to education to be of greater importance compared to the evaluation offered by the previous generations in their twenties. Under transition, a high level of education is considered by researchers to be an important personal resource that can safeguard against exclusion from the labor market. But the role of education in social differentiation is still contradictory. Higher education as such helps people to adapt to the new demands of their social environment, but their specialty is important as well. Because of fundamental restructuring of the economy, qualifications of many people with high education have become irrelevant and their incomes are low. Thus, structural positions that people held before and hold under transition are still of great importance for their opportunities to cope with transitional difficulties. For different groups in the population, education as the personal resource is of different value.

Education and Focus-Group Discussions

Educational composition of focus groups. Gender, nationality, education, and region within the country were chosen as indicators of "relatively similar social status." These indicators were assumed to be hallmarks of perceived unity with "people like me" and perceived difference from "others."

Two level of education were distinguished: "no more than secondary education" and "higher education."

Since we had not agreed with other project participants about type of secondary education, the Estonian team decided that it would be better to avoid any "specifications" in instructions for our recruiters. They were simply told to find people with "no more than secondary education." As a result, we have focus groups in Estonia with very different distributions of representatives from all three types of secondary education. In Narva, seven of the eight women had specialized secondary education, and only one had general secondary education. None of the men among Russians in Sillamae had specialized secondary education; most had attended general secondary schools.

"Higher education" was also not specified in terms of either specialty or place of graduation. As a result, there was considerable variation among the four focus groups with higher education in Tallinn:
* Estonian men and women had a wide range of specialties, and all of them had graduated from two of six Estonian institutions of higher education (during the Soviet period); i.e., from Tallinn Polytechnic Institute and Tartu State University.
* All Russian men had specialties in engineering, but only two out of eight had received this training in Estonia. Russian women represented different types of specialties; most of them -- five out of eight -- graduated from the above-mentioned two Estonian institutions of higher education.

Main Hypotheses
First, on the basis of analysis of answers for the final focus group question, I would hypothesize for Estonia that:
* Women are more inclined to refer to their education as an indicator of their identity; more educated women are more likely to mention education as a feature of "people like me."
* Men are more inclined to refer to their employment status as an indicator of their identity; more educated men are more likely to mention employment status as a feature of "people like me."
* Differences in references had a rather gendered pattern (e.g., men were more likely to refer to class, while women were more likely to refer to age).
* Despite this, all focus group participants with higher education referred to their sex as a feature of "people like me."

Second, the higher the participant's education, the wider the range of certain kinds of identities they are able to articulate. Thus, while only a few participants (three out of ninety-one) mentioned ethnicity as a feature of "people like me" in their answers to the final focus group question, in the course of discussions most participants clearly referred to their ethnicity as an important identity. For example, Russian women with (mostly general) secondary education in Sillamae referred to "Russian people" as such. Women with (mostly specialized) secondary education in Narva referred to "Russian people," but also to "Russian people in Narva" (not clearly articulated as hyphenated "Estonian-Russians" but similar to this). Women with higher education in Tallinn clearly articulated three types of Russian identities in Estonia. One of them explained how she was forced to identify herself with Russians (even though her father was Tajik); another explained how in Estonia under transition everything is being done to destroy Russian national style of life; a third women explained the meaning of what we would call hyphenated ethnic identification -- Estonian-Russians as distinct from those in Russia.

Third, the higher the person's education, the higher the probability of his/her relative "independence" from a single identity and the greater the likelihood that composite identities (considered by higher educated people as important) influence peopleís evaluation of changes and their perceptions of what are "improvements" or "difficulties" of transition. Thus, contrary to the usual complaints of Russian people outside of Russia, women with higher education from Tallinn said that their forced Russian identity is an improvement accompanying transition. Another women with higher education told about the disappearance of "ideological press" as an improvement of transition, but they also told about (a new kind of) "ideological press" as a difficulty of transition.

All in all, I would hypothesize that the higher the level of education, the wider is his/her possible range of identities, the more individual is his/her evaluation of "objective" circumstances or facts of his/her life course, and, as a result, the more "subjectively determined" is his/her identity of "winners" or "losers" of transition.

With regard to further analysis of data from the project on "Identity Formation and Social Issues in Estonia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan," I would make the following recommendations:
* Since "no more than secondary education" as a break characteristic actually distinguishes an internally heterogeneous group with quite a wide range of educational and social opportunities, it would be useful to provide transcriptions of focus groups with data on type of secondary education attained by participants. One might derive these data from the preinterview questionnaires. It would help to understand the backgrounds of participants.
* Since people with higher education also might be considered to be an internally heterogeneous group with very different social and material returns to their high level of education depending on their positions in economic and/or spatial structures, it would be useful to provide transcriptions of focus groups with data on specialty, place of graduation, and information about their current job. These data would also be derived from preinterview questionnaires.

For further projects, I would propose the following:
* Secondary specialized education as a type of education "between" high and general secondary education should be approached as a particular type of education. For surveys, it is always useful to distinguish this type of secondary education; for qualitative studies like "Identity Formation and Social Issues in Estonia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan," it also would be better to make preliminary decisions regarding secondary specialized education. Thus, if it is important to maximize differences among groups, it would be better to exclude people with this level of education or to include an agreed-upon "quota" (for example "no more than two person with secondary specialized education").
* In post-socialist countries, different higher education specializations are connected to different sectors of the restructured economy and thus to different chances to win or lose. For surveys of people with higher education, it would be useful to distinguish specialization and place of graduation, on the one hand, and parameters of their current work situation, on the other hand. In qualitative studies like "Identity Formation and Social Issues in Estonia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan," it also would be better to make more precise decisions regarding the composition of people with higher education.
* I think it would be interesting to check the hypothesis that the higher the level of a personís education, the more difficult it is (for the "external observer"!) to distinguish the person's single dominant identity, and the more difficult it is to predict how these single identities influence the personís evaluations of his/her objective life situation. It would be useful to be prepared to look for different types of relationships between subjective evaluations and (generalized measures of) objective conditions for people with different levels of education.