Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic and measures taken in order to manage it profoundly changed the education provision around the world, from temporary complete school closure to rapid shift to online education. Romania was not an exception; at the beginning all the schools and universities being closed and then different strategies of shifting to online education being more or less successfully adopted. The general perception was that the quality of teaching and learning processes was declining, while the motivation to continue education was also significantly affected. Disruption of educational processes, social isolation significantly affecting adolescents and youth, changing skills needs and more insecure future career prospects also significantly influenced the youth decisions in different areas of their lives.

In this paper we analyse the perceived effects of experiences generated by COVID-19 pandemic on youth educational decisions. For this purpose, we use the dataset of a survey carried out in the summer of 2021 on a representative sample of Romanian youth aged 16-34 years old. We use exploratory techniques to analyse how positive or negative perceived effects vary with level of education, educational outcomes, perceived quality of online education or perceived effects of COVID-19 pandemic on the physical and mental health.

Acknowledgement:
This work has been supported by the NUCLEU program, funded by Ministry of Education and Research, under the project PN 19130302.

Keywords:

Educational decisions, youth decisions, classification methods, COVID-19 pandemic.