Patterns of Labour Market Entry of Higher Education Graduates in Poland in the COVID-19 Times

Agnieszka Chlon-Dominczak, SGH Warsaw School of Economics
Mikolaj Jasinski, University of Warsaw
Marek Bozykowski, University of Warsaw

We analyse the career paths of higher education graduates in Poland before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We assess, to what extent the labour market consequences related to stringency measures introduced in Poland during the COVID-19 pandemic affected the labour market entry of HE graduates. We use the data from the Polish Higher Education Graduate Tracer Survey (ELA), a population-based system based on registry data. We assume that the higher education graduates are equipped with capital that make them resilient to the economic shock of the COVID-19 pandemic. There are some groups of graduates that perform better on poorer. Our results show that for the entire population of graduates, the distributions of economic status are similar in the pandemic period for the 2018 cohort and its counterpart for the 2016 cohort. We assign the graduates populations into ten clusters. Then, we estimated a multinomial regression model separately for the two cohorts. Our results indicate that the labour market entry mechanism for higher education graduates in Poland was not modified by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the qualitative perspective we observe the same labour market entry patterns and apparent impact of Covid-19 is related on their sequences of labour market entry.

Keywords: Children, Adolescents, and Youth, Population, Shocks and Pandemics

See paper.