Uniwersytety na rubieżach - Konteksty semantyczne, historyczne, naukowe i edukacyjne

Recent decades have been a time of unusually intense changes taking place in all areas of life, including the higher education institutions. One direction of change is economic instrumentalism. According to it, universities and other higher education institutions are perceived and treated as institutions of the market. Their performance is evaluated on the basis of ‘measurable’ indicators that will justify the expenditure of public money. One such indicator is employability. The purpose of the chapter is to study the situation of the frontier university graduates in the labour market and to search for answers to the following questions: what types of activities do graduates of these universities engage in? What kind of remuneration do they receive for their work? Does the frontier location make the situation of graduates different from those who graduate from universities located in the centre? The analyses were based on the existing data. Two data sources were used. The first one is the National System for Monitoring the Economic Fate of University Graduates (Pol.: ELA). The second source is data collected by the Academic Career Service of the University of Szczecin and made available to the authors of the text. Taking into account the geographical understanding of the frontier, the following universities were considered in the analysis: the University of Warmia and Mazury, The University of Białystok, the University of Rzeszów, the University of Opole, the University of Szczecin and the University of Zielona Góra. Thus, in order to compare the situation of the frontier university graduates, the data pertaining to graduates of the universities representing the centre – the Warsaw University, the Jagiellonian University and the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań – were also included.