‘I wish I could turn back time’: Understanding social vulnerability of early school leavers

In today's international economic crisis, various groups confront growing vulnerability. Recent studies have stressed how educational deficits, underachievement and skill gaps among young people are both a cause and effect of unemployment, low incomes and other multiple deprivations and social exclusion. The youth that has dropped out from secondary education are in a particularly precarious position. This group has been at the margins of society even during prosperity, but now their life chances are increasingly shrinking and they face enduring social exclusion. Therefore, we examine a group of young people in Croatia who had dropped out of secondary education. By conducting life story interviews focusing on their educational paths, we pinpointed the critical junctures of these young people's educational (drop­out) trajectories. We also examined how they perceived their life chances and the consequences of their decision to drop out. Our preliminary findings, based on six interviews, suggest a wide array of specific circumstances that, combined with the lack of support in their environment, resulted in these young people's decision to leave the secondary education, which they all now regret. Results illustrate an early school leaving as a process resulting from a complex interaction of factors and emphasize the contextual situations that can truncate educational attainment and work prospects. This study is ongoing, but even these preliminary results, based on life story interviews, outline a complex picture of the cycle of marginality as well as social uncertainty of these young people, that other methods of research would not easily have found.