Higher education services are at a crossroads created by the disruptive impact of digitalization. The COVID-19 pandemic experience forced Romanian universities to use digital educational platforms and other online education tools. The questions put into discussion are: Where is Romanian university education headed, what attributes of service quality are relevant for students, how do they see the digitization experience, and what needs to be done to increase satisfaction? A survey was conducted based on an online questionnaire on a sample of 314 students from the University of Oradea that used, for the first time in empirical research, a scale to measure satisfaction with the quality of educational services to which a dimension of digital education is added. Revised importance–performance analysis (importance–performance analysis in nine quadrants with one parameter c-9Qc-IPA) was used for data processing. The results show a still-reserved attitude towards certain aspects of the digitization of services, with priority remaining on aspects related to the material base and the prospects of finding a suitable job after graduation.

In the context of globalized society, the education offer seeks to prepare young people to adapt as best as possible to the demands of the labour market. The best possible integration of young people into the labour market takes into account both opportunities on it and important decisions that they make to increase their chances of a good job. In an internationalized environment, the chances of a good job increase if the employee has a good knowledge of the concepts in an international language. The specialized literature offers various analyses and approaches regarding the motivation of young people to choose to access university studies in a second language. In order to find out what are the students’ motivations for choosing to study business administration in English, we conducted 13 interviews with first year bachelor students from the Faculty of Economic Sciences of the University of Oradea. In our research, through semi-structured interviews applied to first year students who study in English, we aimed to highlight their opinion on the following topics: choosing the program in English, evaluating the educational offer or expectations related to the workplace and career opportunities. The students’ answers are a good indicator of the perceptions regarding the motivation to choose to study in English. The motivation to study in English starts from the knowledge of the English language and extends to the opportunities that the study of business administration in English offers in relation to the future career. They are eager to find a job in Romania, but they will not refuse an opportunity in another country, if such an opportunity arises. Students’ motivations and perceptions regarding education are an important indicator to have a more realistic picture of their expectations of the education offer as well as their integration and success on the labour market. In our future analyses regarding students’ perceptions of the choice of studies, we will seek to expand the analyses both by specializations and by years and level of studies.

In the context of the intensely debated topic of the impact of entrepreneurship education on students' entrepreneurial intentions, the current paper presents findings of the entrepreneurial intentions of a group of doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers from different fields of study enrolled in the SmartDoct project-an entrepreneurship education project co-financed through the European Social Fund and implemented by the University of Oradea, Romania, between 2019 and 2022. Our paper investigates individual-level determinants of the intention to become an entrepreneur, grounding in the social-cognitive, planned behaviour, and human capital theories. Using content analysis of semi-structured interviews, the paper offers insights into the narratives related to the entrepreneurial intentions of doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, including relevant suggestions regarding the impact of gender, field of study, perceived influence of behavioural control, social norms concerning social support, and of the role models. Our results document the capacity of entrepreneurial programmes to encourage business initiation via stimulating entrepreneurial self-efficacy, the importance of perceived behavioural control on explaining entrepreneurial intention, and the value of social support and of role models, as well as the salience of the gender and field of study in explaining the net effect of entrepreneurial training in the case of students enrolled in advanced research programmes.

Young people on the labor market is a topical issue both in academia and in the latest European and national policies. Young graduates are no exception. They invest in education and want a better match of their studies with the job. Some analyzes performed on AMIGO data and data performed with economics graduates help us to analyze the existing situation. The conclusions show us significant differences in terms of income, in terms of the field of study as well as the mismatch with the graduated field. In terms of gender, there are differences in job satisfaction, with men being more likely to reach leadership positions than women.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a largely debated, yet often contradictory concept. Important developments in the area of engagement of firms in socially responsible behaviors are driven from practitioners themselves. There are several international organizations promoting CSR standards and good practice models. Consequently some definitions and theories are based on practitioners' opinions. Romanian analyses are limited in providing narratives of managers regarding social responsibility of the firms coordinated by them. In this paper we investigate social responsibility contributions of small and medium enterprises (SME) in Bihor County, Romania. Previous research proved that the intensity of social involvement is explained by a proactive attitude of managers of SMEs towards the role of business sector in providing welfare. We explored further the motivations and attitudes of managers of socially active SMEs in order to provide an in-depth perspective of their profile. For this aim qualitative methods were used, the authors of this paper conducted 10 face-to-face interviews with an average duration of half an hour. Through these 10 interviews we have identified three motivational profiles of managers engaged in CSR: feeling of duty, pragmatic and opportunistic. Such research fills in the gap regarding CSR at the level of SMEs, a level that brings new insight in the understanding of the mechanisms that trigger such behavior. Future research should extend such qualitative approach and integrate more input from different economic sectors and firms of different sizes.

The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility covers a wide range of actions which have been practiced for many years in Western countries. As well as in other developing and transitional countries, the concept of social responsibility emerged in Romania after 1990, concurrently with the set-up of many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the entrance of multinational companies and was rapidly adopted by several firms. The main purpose of our paper is to investigate practices and actions related to social responsibility, which are undertaken by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Romania and to reveal which factors really matter in determining different degrees of involvement in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) actions. The level of social responsibility actions undertaken by SMEs often depends on the decisions of their managers and the value orientation of the entrepreneur. Moreover, the younger a firm is, the less likely it is that it gets involved in CSR. This is our main assumption: young ventures display a weaker propensity for CSR actions. In order to validate this hypothesis, we used survey data, collected from 84 SMEs, operating in Oradea, Romania. Data were collected between July–September 2016 and analysed by the authors through correlations, independent sample T-tests and linear regression modelling. Our findings reveal that there are significant differences between newly established ventures and those with a longer history; however, age is not a determining factor of CSR. Although, in the literature, there is no clear consensus regarding whether there is a different model of implementation of CSR related practices in developing and transitional countries, especially in the case of SMEs, our results show there are no essential differences between the models of CSR involvement as these are known in the theory and practice of developed countries.

In the context of the European Union's interest in promoting entrepreneurial education and learning, entrepreneurial universities aim to be strong and innovative organizations able to provide effective and sustainable solutions for social and economic development, but without giving up on their traditional task of ensuring a high scientific education for young people. Our paper uses survey data gathered from 194 students at a Romanian university included in the framework of the Entrepreneurship University program and the strategic instrument HElnnovate, on 7 pillars. The analysis reveals a very strong correlation between the pillars "Leadership and Governance" and "Organisational Capacity: Funding, People and Incentives", and between "Knowledge Exchange and Collaboration" and "The Internationalised Institution", respectively. However, data indicates a "below average" performance in terms of innovation in this university from a country which itself is considered a modest innovator by EU reports on entrepreneurship and innovation.

Theories regarding youth participation on the labor market help us draw a detailed picture of the elements composing and influencing the labor market. Starting with individual factors and ending with policy level drivers, the labor market is analyzed both macro-economically as well as from the perspective of micro-economy. According to studies in the field there are different views regarding insertion on the labor market. It can be analyzed from the perspective of individual contribution to economic activity or occupation, that of age groups, of areas or economic sectors, of residential areas and gender, the view on occupations, production, incomes and many others. Often these criteria on which the labor market is structured are combined. The process of youth integration on the labor market is intensely studied in the scientific literature often under the influence of the International Labor Organization using the concept of “school-to-work transition”. Our study is dedicated to the analysis of this transition of the graduates of the Faculty of Economic Sciences from University of Oradea. The professional path of young graduates of higher education remains a topic of interest both for scientific reasons as well as practical in order to improve employment policies. The main objective of this paper is to describe the integration on the labor market of economic graduates focusing on the before mentioned Faculty, creating profiles of this integration and finding correlates of a successful integration. This objective could be achieved through the analysis of data collected within a tracer study conducted with the graduates of our faculty in 2015. We have 247 valid answers to the questionnaire, and we base the analysis on these responses. The sample is far from being representative: students were self-selected from the students who wanted to answer to the questionnaire. Our conclusion is that graduates that find a job, even more whether that job is in the field, are students that worked during their studies, have parents with higher education and declare satisfaction with their studies.

Skills mismatch is a generic term that refers to various types of imbalances of skills and competencies offered and those needed in the labour market. The concept has become one intensely discussed and subjected to measurements in research amid international concerns about its human resource under-utilization. The article aims to analyse under-employment of economic studies graduates. This is achieved by analysing the results of a professional path survey, with bachelor graduates of Faculty of Economics, University of Oradea, conducted at the end of 2015. Our main research question was: which are the predictors of the over-qualification of University of Oradea. Faculty of Economic Sciences graduates. The analyses show that under-employment of our graduates is not explained by any demographic variables, but solely by employment outside the domain and specialization of education, as well as by number of jobs previously held by respondents.

Corporate Social Responsibility is a well-established concept, covering a wide range of actions practiced for many years in western countries; at European level, social responsibility is a philosophy, a way of ethic and responsible behavior which covers all aspects of the relationship with own employees, clients, shareholders, stakeholders, local communities. However, in Romania, the concept of social responsibility has emerged after 1990, along with the set-up of many NGOs and the entrance of multinational companies. After 2000, many other Romanian business companies, both large and SMEs, started to involve in actions of social responsibility, especially for improving the environment, adopting social measures for employees etc. The main purpose of our paper is to investigate practices and actions related to social responsibility, which are undertaken by SMEs, and to reveal which factors really matter in determining different degrees of involvement in CSR actions. Nevertheless, the level of social responsibility actions undertaken by SMEs often depend on the decisions of their managers and the value orientation of the entrepreneur seems one of the most prominent factors driving CSR actions. However, the younger a firm the less likely it is that it gets involved in CSR. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the firms' age and the level of their social involvement We expect to find out that young ventures display a weaker propensity to get involved in social responsibility actions. In order to validate this hypothesis, we use survey data collected during July - September 2014, from 48 SMEs operating in Oradea, Romania. Our findings reveal that there are significant differences between newly established ventures and those with a longer history in several directions related to their CSR profile. Managers of young firms are more inclined to consider that producing social welfare is the sole responsibility of government, and therefore the firms they own and themselves are significantly less involved in CSR actions. Nevertheless, our conclusions based on both theoretical synthesis and our analysis suggest that including business ethics and social responsibility related aspects in educational programs for entrepreneurship would reinforce such approach on behalf of new firms. A strategic approach to CSR from the beginning of the activity of a company is likely to improve the impact of such initiatives on the community and contribute to deeper and earlier involvement of SMEs in social responsibility actions.

The dynamics of the higher education access is one of the challenges that Europe has to face regarding education and labour market challenges. Romania has to deal with the expansion of higher education with its particularities. Regardless the specificities, expansion of higher education in Romania and in European countries, the number of higher education graduates have a constant upward trend at EU level. The population of graduates in Romania face the most dramatic developments: the number of graduates almost triples between 2003 and 2008, when it reached a peak due to the overlapping of the last generation pre-Bologna and the first generation Bologna followed by a veritable collapse in 2011 and 2012. According to European statistics, such catastrophic changes have not happened in any European country, even in crisis conditions. In this paper we investigate the evolution of higher education graduation in Romania comparatively with the European level rates. We highlight the fast expansion followed by contraction noted for most domains of study in Romania, nonetheless the most accentuated for economic sciences. Investigating the factors that influence this evolution we could neither support nor fully reject the impact of demographic decline of young population in Romania, nor the decline in graduation rates of secondary level education. These results are affected by the high percentage of non-traditional students in Romania, students that graduated high-school or have had other studies before 1990. These people wanted to complete their studies according to their occupation or in order to have access to better jobs, with better salaries. Also the adoption of the Bologna reform influenced the apparition of a peak in higher education graduation in 2008-2009. In the final section we focus on the evolution of number of students and graduates of Economic Studies from University of Oradea, proving that the same trends as at national level are present. However, in order to better understand future trends such an analyses should also integrate information regarding employability of graduates depending on domain or field of study (evolutions of the labour market), information at institution level such as endowments and prestige, international migration of secondary school graduates. Understating such trends at both national, field and institution level are bound to better prepare universities to face future challenges.

This paper emerges in the context of authors` previous investigations concerning the individual determinants of entrepreneurship. More specific, it focuses on elaborating and empirically testing hypotheses related to structural push and pull factors, e.g. age, gender, education, type of residence, and also to two kinds of psycho-attitudinal factors, i.e. risk aversion and individualist vs. etatist economic ideology. While the literature review gives credit to both hypotheses, especially for the influence of risk attitudes on starting a business, this paper focuses on the analysis of self-employment by using the block-model logistic regression on 2008 Romanian EVS (European Values Survey) data. The results of multivariate analysis confirm the importance of risk aversion for entrepreneurship, as expected, but reject the hypothesis of a significant effect of individual’s option for individualist vs. collectivist (or statist) continuum. It is important to notice that, contrary to expectations, two important push factors, i.e. age and education, do not correlate with self-employment and, on the other hand, risk attitude adds itself to the other effects without interacting with it. The theoretical consequences of the findings, the limits of the research and further developments are also discussed in the paper.

This paper emerges in the context of authors' previous investigations concerning the individual determinants of entrepreneurship. More specific, it focuses on elaborating and empirically testing hypotheses related to structural push and pull factors, e. g. age, gender, education, type of residence, and also to two kinds of psycho-attitudinal factors, i.e. risk aversion and individualist vs. etatist economic ideology. While the literature review gives credit to both hypotheses, especially for the influence of risk attitudes on starting a business, this paper focuses on the analysis of self-employment by using the block-model logistic regression on 2008 Romanian EVS (European Values Survey) data. The results of multivariate analysis confirm the importance of risk aversion for entrepreneurship, as expected, but reject the hypothesis of a significant effect of individual's option for individualist vs. collectivist (or statist) continuum. It is important to notice that, contrary to expectations, two important push factors, i.e. age and education, do not correlate with self-employment and, on the other hand, risk attitude adds itself to the other effects without interacting with it. The theoretical consequences of the findings, the limits of the research and further developments are also discussed in the paper.

Transition from school to work is a main issue with many fields of study. Studies on transition from school to work, have highlight the importance of two categories of factors at the level of the individual formal proceedings which may affect how easy it is to graduate to integrate into the labor market: 1) so far as the educational systems are transmitting specific competences as compared with those general and 2) so far as there are direct links between employers and the education system. In this way, are reduced the costs of selection and allocation for employers. A poor articulation between educational institutions and the labor market produce a high level of unmatched competences of assimilated by formal education and competencies required of the labor market (skill mismatch) (Parodi et al., 2012). The surveys with European employers reflect particular difficulties that they are experiencing in employment vacancies. Investigation on the European companies in the spring of 2013 found that 40% of the firms in the EU have difficulty in finding employees with suitable qualification (CEDEFOP-European Center for the Development of the Vocational Training, 2014). Skills mismatch is a generic term that refers to various types of imbalances between skills and competences offered and those required in the labor market. Concept has become one intensely discussed and submitted to measurement in international research on the background concerns the under-utilization human resource. Numerous opinion polls with employers come to the same unexpected conclusion - that despite high unemployment many posts can't find occupants satisfactorily prepared and identify the causes: most of them criticized the lack of skills of the candidates or the absence of skills specific to the workplace. Based on the latest studies on international databases have built a set of questions that, through secondary analysis, we tried to find answers. Questions that we try to give answer are: What are the main types of skills mismatch? What are the main ways to measure skills mismatch? What are the indicators of skills mismatch? What is the level of over-education and under-education in European countries? How to calculate skills mismatch between demand and supply of labor at European level? What factors explain the different labor market chances of young people compared to adults? What are the predictors at the macro level and individual level of skills mismatch?

Social change in Romania the last 20 years have brought great changes in labour market structure. These changes are explained both by former communist country characteristics and by the dynamics of the economy. There are systematic differences in social compositions of the country and there are different contexts in which economic activity is developed in various types of countries. Theories of entrepreneurship distinguish between push and pull type of mechanisms explaining self-employment and business start-up. As widely recognized, economic spill-over effects of entrepreneurships are more significant in the case of enterprises that invest serious human, physical and financial capital than in the case of those adopting self-employment as unique solution to grim prospects for employment. That is why we consider as a relevant research topic the description of Romanian population of self-employed individuals starting from specific hypotheses derived from theory. The final aim is to assess the weight of the two types of entrepreneurs, by using recent survey data. The objective of the paper will be fulfilled by using bivariate and multivariate statistical techniques to analysing most recent EVS (European Values Study) data collected in Romania, which contains items identifying self-employed individuals. Subsequently, we will test hypotheses connecting the status of self-employment with level of education, level of parents' education, type of residence, occupation of parents and gender. Our expectations are that, contrary to the ideal-type of daring-educated-upper-class entrepreneur, most of our self-employed individuals are of push-type, being less educated and having a more deprived socio-economic background (with parents with lower status occupations, with lower cultural capital) than active employed citizens. The results of the statistical analyses will be interpreted against the theories in the area and will be related with the economic and socio-demographic context of Romania. In the concluding chapter, the consequences of the findings for Romanian social and economic policies will be examined, and the necessity for the emergence of a solid economy and a large and a powerful middle class, will be discussed.

Models of entrepreneurial behavior usually focus on individual level factors, yet starting and running a business depends a great deal on economic, social and institutional environment. Our analysis uses data from 2008 European Social Survey to assess the weight of country-level characteristics in explaining individual entrepreneurship measured as self-employment or business ownership. The article starts with a specialist literature review which sets the bases for our hypotheses. The results describe cross-country comparisons of entrepreneurship rates, individual and country-level regressions of entrepreneurship. As expected, there are large differences between countries with respect to the rates of entrepreneurship. A great part of this variance can be accounted for the division between former socialist countries and other countries and by the levels of urbanization.

Data presented in this paper are part of the activities of the PRACTeam project Practice of students in economics. Inter-regional partnership between universities and the labor market" project co-financed by European Social Fund Operational Programme Human Resources Development 2007-2013 -" Invest in people! "Contract no. POSDRU/90/2.1/S/64150. Identifying the needs of practice activity had as research tools: focus group and questionnaires. Research subjects were third-year students who have completed the practical work from all three partners: Oradea, Timisoara and Suceava. The results obtained in this research were the basis for discussions during the workshop PRACTeam between student representatives, tutors and practice coordinators. Based on the central elements and highlighted problems were developed materials for both tutors and students. The specific objectives of identifying needs for practical training were: to determine administrative and organizational elements deemed most appropriate for students in terms of practical training, identifying methods of communication between all stakeholders (students, coordinators and tutors of practice) the most suitable in terms of training students, identifying the strengths and weaknesses in relation to the conduct of practical training Presentation integrates the results with emphasis on elements that can be improved, structured around the following areas: evaluation of the internship, access into the practice, conduct practical work (satisfaction with the relationship with the tutor, satisfaction with relationship with practice coordinator, student satisfaction with the activity, satisfaction with knowledge, skills acquired in satisfaction with the practice, satisfaction with communication with colleagues) positive, negative aspects, students' views on improving practice activity.

Models of entrepreneurial behavior focus usually on individual level factors yet a great deal of beginning and running a business depends on the economic, social and institutional environment. Our analysis uses data from the 2008 European Social Survey to assess the weight of country-level characteristics in explaining individual entrepreneurship measured as self-employment of business ownership. The article starts with a literature review which puts the bases of our hypotheses. The results describe cross country comparisons of entrepreneurship rates, individual and country-level regressions of entrepreneurship. As expected, there are large differences between countries with respect to rates of entrepreneurship. A great part of this variance can be accounted for by the division between the former socialist countries and the rest and by levels of urbanization.

In this paper I will investigate the associative participation in Oradea, on several levels: the participation rates by citizens, the type of associations in which oradeans participate and the profile of these NGOa€™s. I have collected data both regarding