Job Assignment of Graduates of the University of Bucharest and Their Integration in the Labor System of the 1980s

Abstract

According to the official communist rhetoric, the assignment of higher education graduates to socialist enterprises and/or institutions was ‘an action with profound social-political meanings, which aims to ensure the production units and other areas which the specialists they need’. The closure of the top most populated 14 cities starting with 1981 combined with the economic crisis of the 1980s and with various measures of the regime perceived as absurd, and made the system more restrictive than ever before. This study focuses on the changes of the job supply for graduates of the University of Bucharest during the 1980s, and on the process of assigning graduates to their work-place.