On Dec 19, 2008, at 11:01 AM, Dan M wrote: >> No, by "well-educated" I mean professionals - accountants, lawyers, >> medics etc. > > I thought that was the case, but thanks for the clarification. > >> Cyprus was full of them working bar, waiting, or worse being >> exploited >> in strip clubs. (It wasn't like London where an attractive woman >> could >> make good money doing "exotic dancing" a couple of times a week - >> these girls were often being forced to have sex with customers). > > Well, as you know, that's particularly repugnant to me, both as the > husband > of an abuse victim (who later specialized in social work in working > with > victims) and as the father of daughters. I have heard about this > sort of > thing with uneducated poor Eastern European women, but not about it > happening to the well educated. It's not that the evilness of this > forcing > is less if a woman is undereducated, but this strikes me as > countering the > proposal that education is the ticket out of poverty and exploitation. > > One question comes up, and you may or may not be able to answer it. > Were > the professionals allowed to work menial jobs but not professional > jobs just > because of local laws, customs, prejudices, etc., or do you think > that the > education system in Russia has fallen to the point where, for > example, you'd > never want to have a Russian surgeon operating on you? > > Dan M.
One thing I know at least *used* to be true is that a fairly large portion of the population of former Soviet countries tended to be quite well formally educated, quite often on the master's or doctorate level, enough so that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the competition for the few professional jobs then available even worldwide was such that it was another strike against recent immigrants from former Soviet countries almost everywhere else. It's still true that among former Soviet-bloc emigres of a certain age, you'll find quite a few of them have higher level degrees of some sort, in some cases more than one. I think it was sort of an artifact of the Soviet system that university education was both inexpensive and one of the few things people could readily spend money on, plus to some extent a sort of nationalistic pride. It may be that those degrees are slightly less reflective of actual academic accomplishment than they are elsewhere, but I would say not by much, if at all. Nowadays, I think the driving factors are radically different, since the state-sponsored higher education system was one of the things that collapsed in the post-Soviet era, so the people emigrating to other countries *now* are much more likely to be at most high school educated, considerably poorer, and considerably more desperate. Which, to me, sort of explains how a lot of young women from former Soviet countries now work as models if they're lucky, and get drawn into the sex trade if they're not so lucky. It's definitely not a nice side of humanity that leads to them being exploited, and I don't have to like it (and, trust me, I don't!), but I do understand how it happens .. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
