Trends and Findings in Education-Work Transitions among Young People in Argentina: a Study on Two Cohorts of Secondary School Graduates

Abstract

The increasing democratisation of education and the destructuring of the labour market in times of institutional, political and economic uncertainty in Latin America have fuelled the debate on the youth school-to-work transition in the region. This paper aims to contribute to the discussion by presenting the insights drawn from research on the topic, carried out throughout the last thirty years by the same academic team. Such research was based on a longitudinal analyses of students who graduated from compulsory studies during 1999–2011 in Argentina. The main findings provide insights into two core concepts: on the one hand, they evidence that the period of transition between the completion of secondary school and the labour market entry has become longer; on the other hand, they show that education-work activities in the early years after completing secondary studies are characterised by their instabilityfeature present in young people’s stories from different socioeconomic backgrounds.