Barriers to Adult Education Participation within Senior Population in Latvia

Zane Varpina , SSE Riga

With the 2021 Green Paper on ageing European Commission launched a broad policy debate on the challenges and opportunities of Europe's ageing society. Education and training in a lifelong perspective is laid out as one of the three foundations that can help to “prevent, limit and postpone some of the challenges linked to ageing” (EC, 2021). Over the previous two decades Latvia has experienced one of the steepest population declines in the world, and depopulation happens alongside one of the most rapid ageing in the world too, exacerbating scarcity of labour force. At the same time, participation of adults in education lags behind EU average. With this study we attempt to contribute to the discussion by concentrating on the adult education and training for senior population group with the aim to examine the most important obstacles for participation in learning. We use three rounds of Eurostat Adult Education Survey (AES) microdata and various specifications of logit models to study if persistent barriers exist.

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 Presented in Session P1. Postercafe