Centrally Planned Allocation of Higher Education Graduates in Romania (1950-1970)

The centrally planned compulsory assignment (‘repartition’) of higher education graduates to various socialist enterprises and/or institutions was one of the novelties brought along by the communist system in Romania, closely following the Soviet model. The article focuses on the regulations aspects of how this system actually functioned in the 1950s and 1960s. It demonstrates that in the first stage, the system presented loopholes which allowed some of the graduates to avoid going to the socialist units to which they had been assigned, and the management of these units to refuse to accept graduates they did not really want. Therefore, even if the system was marred by many arbitrary decisions and by ideological considerations that often dwarfed meritocratic criteria, during the 1950s the system allowed for considerable individual bargaining and agency at the margin of official rules. Yet, gradually, the loopholes were closed with the help of targeted bureaucratic regulations, and while meritocratic criteria became increasingly important in the process of assigning higher education graduates to their future workplaces, the system became tighter and allowed for fewer opportunities to circumvent the official rules.