Образование и работа: връзки, възможности и неравенства
Education and Work: Relationships, Opportunities, and Inequalities

Summary/Abstract: Against the background of ongoing controversies that we observe in both a national and global context, regarding the development of the relationship between education and work, this paper aims to explore the attitudes of students to the opportunities which higher education in Bulgaria offers them, their expectations for a future career, and the relationships they form with the labor market during their studies. It is argued that the experience they acquire as undergraduates uncovers a sphere of disparities that affects their attitudes and expectations about their future professional realization. The analysis of a comprehensive quantitative survey among sociology students carried out in 2011 in four public universities reveals that, although higher education offers a variety of opportunities related to the formation of students’ perception of what they would like to work after graduation, half of them cannot project themselves in the future. This opens a space of differences between the group of undergraduates who formulated a set of opportunities that they see before them and those who can not formulate options that they value. These differences most likely will become a precondition for the emergence of inequalities on the exit from university and will impact on their professional trajectories.

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