Corruption, Collusion, and Nepotism in Higher Education and the Labor Market in Georgia.

This article offers a new approach to conceptualizing the limited affordability and access to higher education for socioeconomically disadvantaged students in Georgia. Unlike most traditional views, it associates the issue with corruption, collusion, and nepotism existent in the country's higher education, job market, and banking system. It argues that the inefficiencies are caused by the collusion between a number of higher education institutions (HEIs) and companies that set "unwritten rules" for job market operation and encourage rampant nepotism in the job-hiring process. This article proposes three policy models to dismantle the incestuous web of elite Georgian HEIs-job market-bank. These policy models are: vertical influence, organizational diffusion, and leader-laggard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]