The Education-Work Transition of Venezuelan University Stude

University students in Venezuela constitute about ten percent of the corresponding age group (calculated from Universidad Central de Venezuela 1970: 19, Table 5), and leadership of the country's economic and social development is increasingly in the hands of university-trained professionals. University enrollment has quadrupled since 1958, and young professionals who have graduated over the past fifteen years already represent a majority among university graduates in Venezuela. Research on students and elites, however, in Venezuela as elsewhere in Latin America, has concentrated on their divergent political attitudes while paying scant attention to the transformation of university students into members of the elite.This paper reports on an exploratory survey of student and elite attitudes toward higher education and professional employment in Venezuela. Our findings provide some insight on the extent to which employment of high-level manpower is influenced by modern, achievement-oriented criteria, as compared with traditional, ascriptive criteria.