Making of a Voiceless Youth

This research has analyzed a set of structural elements, procedures, and behaviors within Bosnia and Herzegovina's (thereafter, "Bosnia" or "B&H") higher education that have jointly created an encouraging space for the increasing and self-serving utilization of higher education by the country's post-war elite. Of the particular interest is this elite's impact on the forms of educational corruption, which have shifted away from standard bribing processes and moved toward more complex favor reciprocation networks. This process has ensured that today's corruption is perceived as a norm in Bosnia's higher education. Its prevalence has disrupted existing social mobility mechanisms and created a duality in the social mobility process so that the unprivileged still work hard to obtain their degrees while those with social connections are reliant on Turner's (1960) sponsorship model. The analysis goes beyond dissecting corruption's impact on modes of social mobility by redefining Hirschman's (1970) notions of voice, exit, and loyalty within higher education and expanding his theoretical framework to adequately capture and understand the unique set of coping mechanisms that has emerged with