ABSTRACT This paper explores cross-national variations in the impact of education on labour market outcomes using the risk of unemployment and occupational status as the key dependent variables. The study applies a comparative perspective on eight EU countries (three from CEE), representing different relationships between the education system and the labour market with various degrees of inequality, welfare provisions and labour market flexibility. A temporal comparison investigates the influence of the 2008 economic crisis. The study employs data from the European Union Labour Force Survey 2007, 2009 and 2014. Binary and ordinary least squares regressions are the main analytical methods. Models are fitted to the pooled data and interactions are applied to elaborate on country and temporal variations. The analysis reveals the persistence of returns to school investments; the crisis exerts bigger risk and loss for the less educated. However, this impact is markedly shadowed by the institutional variation at the country level. High flexibility and low inequality could provide some defence, while corporatist features and employment protection decreased the crisis effects. Post-communist countries were hit harder but with a characteristic variance: Slovenia was less affected, Estonia recovered the crisis faster and Hungary was affected at most.

The aim of the paper is to test whether the pupils of religious gymnasiums in Hungary have higher grades and a better opportunity to enter vocational college or university than comparable pupils of public gymnasiums have. For the first time the effectiveness of public and religious schools is compared in one of the former communist societies. Data are from a self-administered survey among 4th grade secondary school students in spring of 1998. Our results show clearly that pupils at religious gymnasiums in Hungary get higher grades and that they have more success in entering tertiary education and university. This is especially true for pupils at Catholic gymnasiums but there are clear indications that the Calvinist and Lutheran gymnasiums might catch up Catholic gymnasiums in the near future, if they get the time to develop themselves. A more selective social composition of these schools, higher earlier school achievements or a higher academic ambition of religious pupils cannot explain these better results of pupils in religious gymnasiums. We conclude from these results that the religious grammar schools in a post-communist country like Hungary are on average more effective than public grammar schools. This does not hold only for Catholic schools but also for Protestant schools, just as in other European societies.

This article addresses the effects of economic and political change on social mobility in Hungary between 1910 and 1989 by investigating whether the effects of family background on schooling and the effects of family background and schooling on first occupation vary between periods in Hungary's twentieth-century history. For this purpose, we distinguish five periods: the long-lasting Depression (1910 to 1933), the period around the Second World War (1934 to 1948), the long 1950s (1949 to 1967), the period of reform socialism (1968 to 1982), and the decline of socialism (1983 to 1989). Using large-scale datasets from 1973, 1983, 1992 and 1993, we are able to investigate developments in the parameters of the status attainment model for about 75,000 men and women. We use spline regressions to find out whether trends in the effects vary between periods. Linear secular trends in the effects of family background and schooling do not predominate; spline models reveal discontinuities between periods. On the other hand, a trend from ascription to achievement both for men and women can be observed. In contrast to the general assumption, the most important deviation from the general trend has taken place in the years before the communist take-over.