Accesul la educaţie al maghiarilor din România. O analiză multivariată Access to Education of Hungarians from Romania. A Multivariate Analysis Section Articles

Abstract

During the transition period, the topic of Hungarian university-level higher education
in Romania has been very intensely debated as its polemic has been often
characterized by ethnicist and nationalist arguments. One major issue of the
debate is, however, that, in Romania, Hungarians have lower chances of access
at tertiary education than the Romanian citizens. The present study aims to clarify
the situation of the distribution and the covariates of educational, and subsequently
social, chances among citizens of Romanian and Hungarian ethnicity in Romania.
Using the consolidated data of the Romanian Public Opinion Barometer of
1998-2004 (N = 11 040) our multivariate analyses start from three models of the
status achievement: the ethnic determination model, the social reproduction model
and the structural mobility model.
Though bivariate analyses indicate that there is significant gap of educational in
educational chances for Hungarians, measured through educational achievement,
multivariate analysis proves that the hypothesis of lower educational chances of
Hungarians from Transylvania does not hold. However, educational inequalities
seem to be more an interregional issue: Seklerland, with an overwhelming majority
of Hungarians, provides significantly lower chances of attaining a higher education
diploma than the rest of Transylvania. One explanation for this could rely on the
modernization deficit of the region. The topic requires further research in order to
clarify the impact of the diverse covariates on career decisions and status attainment.