Browsing by Subject "korkeakoulutus"

The meaning of this study is to find out how the pursuit of efficiency and education at univer-sities is viewed university students. According to the Finnish university act, the purpose of universities is to cultivate education and give the highest form of research-based education. The neoliberal educational policy has driven universities to an ever-increasing pursuit for effi-ciency, and the university has changed significantly during the 2000s, especially after the university act of 2010. The current state of university has been criticized a lot and the staff of universities have voiced a concern regarding the direction of the future of the university. This study examines how students experience the present university’s goals regarding efficiency and education. Nine students from the Faculty of Educational Sciences of the University of Helsinki partici-pated in this study. They have also acted as student activists which means that they have been in a student organization or have acted as a student representative in a body of the uni-versity. The data was collected by interviewing the student activists. The base of the inter-view was a background information form which asked students about their views of university studies. The data was analysed with theory-based content analysis. The results show that the pursuit of efficiency, education and their interweave occurred at university studies. The studies were considered easy, the university staff focused on their re-search rather than teaching and there was a strong encouragement to graduate in target time. These are examples of how the pursuit of efficiency rises up in studies. The values of educa-tion were shown in studies in the studies being in a good level of difficulty, the university staff putting effort into teaching and a trust in extensive possibilities of studying. The interweave of efficiency and education appeared for example through students aiming for a degree and ed-ucation at the same time in university studies. The university studies appear to have gotten new conditions that concentrate on performance-oriented studies. On the other hand, the studies seem to have signs of education and the students of educational sciences consider them to be important. Efficiency and education exist at the studies at the same time.

Extensive evidence in economics shows that facing a recession upon entry to the labor market can have sizable and persistent effects on the earnings and careers of labor market entrants. Long-term negative effects have been found among young and low- educated workers, but also among highly educated labor market participants such as university graduates. Theory and empirical evidence suggest that the negative effects arise because of a prolonged period of job search and fewer opportunities early on in the career for finding employment that fits the worker’s skills, for example. Identifying those most susceptible to persistent effects and understanding the mechanisms and channels underlying them are important for improving the effectiveness of active labor market policies and other public policy instruments as well as the school-to-work transition. This thesis studies the short-term and long-term effects of facing adverse economic conditions upon graduation on real annual earnings, unemployment and other labor market outcomes among Finnish university graduates who obtained a Master’s degree between 1988 and 2004. The empirical strategy uses idiosyncratic variation in regional unemployment rates as a proxy for regional business cycle fluctuation, controlling for common national business cycle fluctuation and regional fixed effects. The thesis contributes to the existing literature in three ways. First, it provides the first evidence on the effects of graduating from university upon adverse economic conditions in Finland. The results with Finnish data are compared to other countries with different labor market institutions. Second, the time period investigated in this thesis (1988-2014) includes a period unlike any other studied in the existing literature: the exceptionally deep 1990s Finnish depression. Third, it contributes to the relatively scarce evidence on gender differences in the effects of graduating into a recession. The data used in this thesis contain matched employer-employee panel data on the first ten post-graduation years of around 140,000 graduates. The results show that facing a six percentage points (roughly a standard deviation) above average regional unemployment rate in the region of residence in the year of graduation on average reduces annual earnings by 12.6% in the following year after graduation. Remarkably, this initial effect is only halved after 9–10 years. These effects on earnings are larger than what have generally been found in the literature and are similar to those reported with U.S. and Canadian data, for example. Furthermore, there is a persistently higher probability of being unemployed that lasts for roughly seven years. Smaller and more short-lived effects are found when only considering cohorts who graduated after the 1990s depression: the effects on earnings last only for the first five years and there are no effects on unemployment. These findings suggest that under more normal business cycle fluctuation, mechanisms other than unemployment are responsible for the earnings losses. Given the relatively high levels of wage rigidity in Finland, the existing literature suggests that the earnings losses can result from task downgrading and skill mismatch, for example. Finally, the results show that the effects on earnings are smaller for female graduates, perhaps reflecting gender differences in fields of study, employing sector and labor market attachment. Robustness checks indicate that the empirical results are not likely to be affected by selective timing or place of graduation.

This thesis focuses on social categories that are constructed from the social value of higher education in the Finnish mass media. The aim of the thesis is to analyze how the hierarchy of education level produces citizenship and social hierarchies. Previous research has shown that the subject is seen in Finnish education policies as a rational agent who makes free choices and self-invests in education. This thesis analyzes power and inequality existing in the discourse of learning and higher education possibilities. I approached the research task using feminist research methodology and the post-structural idea of language and knowledge. Admission to higher education is the context of the study. The data consists of opinion pieces about higher education reforms and the admission process in the spring of 2020. The opinion pieces were published in Helsingin Sanomat. I analyzed the data with a discursive-deconstructive reading and identified affective shades and unequal categories. I focused on the subjectivity of a higher education applicant and tried to find power that operates in discourses. According to the analysis, there is produced a self-responsible subjectivity in the data who struggles to survive in education and in the society. The self-responsible subjectivity is constructed in the contradiction between a dream discourse and demands of employability. In this study, one of the goals is to contextualize knowledge and affects so it is not necessary to look my results out of their historical context. Anyway, the results make possible to understand value choices in the Finnish education policies and social debate. This study argues that the discourse of education possibilities strengths the concept of the ideal citizen who survives because of its own merit. The discourse complicates to recognize social inequality. What is more, highlighting the social value of higher education produces the hierarchy of education paths and categories based on education level.

Tutkimuksessa selvitetään Helsingin yliopiston valtiotieteellisestä tiedekunnasta valmistuneiden siirtymistä työelämään. Tarkoituksena on avata siirtymään liittyvää problematiikkaa ja tutkia työelämässä esiintyviä sosiaalisia verkostoja. Tutkimusta varten haastateltiin yhdeksää henkilöä, jotka olivat valmistuneet noin viisi vuotta aikaisemmin valtiotieteiden maistereiksi. Haastatteluissa kartoitettiin heidän kokemuksiaan työelämään siirtymisestä. Haastatteluiden lisäksi aineistona toimii haastateltavien työhistorioista muodostetut työjanat ja taustatiedot. Tutkimusmenetelmänä on käytetty kvalitatiivista sisällönanalyysiä. Laadullinen aineisto antaa uudenlaisen lähestymistavan työelämään siirtymisen tutkimiseen. Tutkimuksen lähtökohdat rakentuvat korkeakoulutettujen työelämään siirtymistä käsitelleiden tutkimusten, työelämän tutkimuksen ja verkostoanalyysin varaan. Tutkimustulokset muodostuvat kolmesta analyysiluvusta, joissa käsitellään opiskeluaikaa ja yliopistokoulutusta, valtiotieteilijöiden kohtaamaa muuttuvaa työelämää sekä verkostoitunutta työelämää. Tulosten mukaan osa haastateltavista oli opiskeluaikanaan huolestunut työllistymisestään, mutta toisen osan haastateltavista huomattiin suhtautuvan siirtymään ’töiden shoppailuna’. ’Töiden shoppailussa’ työmarkkinoilla toimitaan kuluttajina ja etsitään sopivaa työpaikkaa omien mieltymysten mukaan (Johnson 1978; Hämäläinen 2002). Toiseksi vastavalmistuneet valtiotieteiden maisterit haluavat tutkimuksen mukaan jatkuvasti kouluttautua uudelleen ja kehittyä työelämässä (ks. Julkunen 2008a; Julkunen 2008b; Sennett 2002). Haastattelupuheessa tasapainoilee pelko jämähtämisestä ja määräaikaisista työsuhteista. Aineistosta löytyi kolme erilaista työjanaa, professionaalinen, intressikohtainen ja generalistinen, joiden kautta on mahdollista ymmärtää valtiotieteilijöiden erilaisia urapolkuja. Kolmanneksi tutkimus kartoittaa, miten sosiaalisia verkostoja hyödynnetään siirtymässä koulutuksesta työelämään (ks. Jokisaari & Nurmi 2004). Kaikki haastateltavista olivat saaneet useamman kuin yhden työpaikan sosiaalisten verkostojensa kautta. Sosiaaliset verkostot toimivat työnhakukanavana, koska niiden sisällä liikkuu tietoa. Toisin sanoen voidaan puhua sosiaalisten verkostojen tuomista informaatiohyödyistä (Lin 2001), jotka ilmenevät heikkoina siteinä (Granovetter 1983; 1995) ja rakenteellisina aukkoina (Burt 2001). Tutkimuksessa esiintyvät työllistymiseen vaikuttaneet sosiaaliset suhteet perustuvat suurimmalta osin sosiaalisen pääoman (Bourdieu 2007 [1986]) kautta syntyneeseen luottamukseen (Coleman 1988; Mäkelä & Ruokonen 2005). Tutkimustulosten mukaan päämäärätietoiseen verkostoitumiseen suhtaudutaan varauksella, mutta ystäville tietoja avoimista työmahdollisuuksista välitetään mielellään. Erottelu syntyy kilpailusuhteiden ja ystävyyssuhteiden välille, joissa sosiaalista pääomaa käytetään eri tavoilla (ks. Johanson & Uusikylä 2005). Tutkimuksen mukaan valtiotieteiden maisterit työllistyvät sellaisten sosiaalisten verkostojen kautta, joissa liikkuu tietoa ja joihin liittyy luottamus.