Abstract:

This study examines territorial differences in Russian students' choice of educational trajectory after secondary school in 2000 – 2014 years between regions in various socio-economic and cultural contexts. Russian case might be interesting for the social and economic gap between Russian provinces, which is comparable to between-countries differences: some regions equal to Singapore or Netherland in GDP per capita, while other are similar to Honduras or Bolivia [Worldbank, 2018]. These differences in economic development, among other things, are also associated with the gap in human capital [Benhabib, Spiegel 1994, Becker et al 1990], which is traditionally measured through the level of education of the population. In Russian system of education the actual choice of educational trajectory takes place at the end of the secondary school, when children should choose between academic track, which presumes admission to the high school and university after that, and vocational track, which includes admission to college.

Since 2000 year, the proportion of secondary school graduates, who chose academic track, has been declined in most of Russian regions, despite growing access to higher education thanks to the raise in the number of universities in 2000-2008 with simultaneous demographic decline. With the dynamic time warping algorithm and time series cluster analysis [Sakoe 1990, Paparrizos, Gravano 2017] there were identified six different types of regional situations in the dynamics of the percentage of students who chose an academic track after secondary school.

In general, in the most economically advantaged regions with the developed infrastructure of higher education the popularity of the academic trajectory remains at the same high level. But also there were some decreases in 2009 and 2013, that could be the consequence of world economic crises in those years. These crises became some sort of the additional signals on the regional level for the families in more developed territories to re-evaluate their children's chances for higher education and the associated costs.

At the same time, the proportion of students on academic track in more economically disadvantaged regions with lower access to higher education has gradually decreased since 2000. These students have been receiving a “double fine” because they had to plan their education strategy taking into account higher competition for places in universities or moving to other regions for entering educational institutions there, which is also associated with growing costs. In this situation, the vocational track becomes a more affordable alternative for students from regions with lower level of economic and social development.

As the result of the analysis, there is possible to determine some sort and long term prerequisites for further growth in human capital gap between Russian regions and, consequently, enlarging differences in economic development.

Keywords:

Regional inequality, educational inequality, human capital, secondary education, higher education, educational trajectories, dynamic time warping.