Changing higher education and welfare states in postcommunist Central Europe: New contexts leading to new typologies? (original) (raw)
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Higher Education Policies in Central and Eastern Europe: Convergence toward a Common Model?
Governance, 2009
Contrary to many other areas, international and, in particular, European influences on national policymaking in higher education (HE) have remained limited. This picture, however, changed fundamentally from the late 1990s onward. In 1999, 29 countries signed the Bologna Declaration, denoting the start of the so-called Bologna Process. Thus, a collective supranational platform was developed to confront problem pressure, which has in turn fostered considerable domestic reforms. However, we still have limited knowledge on whether the Bologna Process has actually led to the convergence of national HE policies toward a common model. This article analyzes these questions by focusing on Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. Because of its tumultuous and inconsistent path of development and the sheer magnitude of the current reform processes, CEE HE stands out as a particularly worthwhile object of analysis for scholars interested in policy convergence as well as policy legacies and path dependencies.
Higher Education in Europe, Vol. XXVI, No. 3, 2001
The thesis of this article is that the main factors contributing to the need to rethink higher education institutions today are linked to the advent of the global age. Although the countries of Central and Eastern Europe are not yet feeling the full force of the ensuing pressures, higher education here is likely to be affected very soon by globalization-relate d processes. Higher education all over the world, including Central and Eastern Europe, is no longer the unique part of the public sector that it used to be, either in explicit political declarations, in public perceptions, or in practical terms. Higher education is doubly affected by the local post-1989 transformations and by more profound and more long-lasting global transformations. To neglect either of the two levels of analysis is to misunderstand a decade of failed attempts to reform higher education systems in this part of the world.
The future of higher education in Central-Eastern Europe: problems and possibilities
European Review, 1998
The main beliefs, strategies and problems marking the road of higher educational change in the Central–Eastern European countries are analysed and distinction is made between three main actors: government, clients and the academic community. At governmental level the focus is on the handicapping effects of conflict between short and long-term reform and the internal nature of the government-higher education relationship. Government initiated reforms should offer transitory and contextual solutions rather than permanent and substantive ones. The traditional lack of distinction between higher education as public versus private good and the problems and consequences of expanding higher education is examined. The political power of the academic community can hamper the effectiveness of reforms and external accountability. Reforms should separate the merged functions of supervision, allocation and professional accreditation. At the institutional level, executive leadership should be sepa...
European Journal of Higher Education, 2015
This introductory article deals with higher education (HE) transformations in Central and Eastern Europe in the context of democratization and globalization. The authors first briefly survey the wider canvas of reform since 1989, particularly probing the extent to which the countries of the region may be treated as a distinctive or a cohesive group. Diverging experiences with communism, international organizations and the European Union are highlighted, while attention is also focused on the differing degrees of marketization exhibited by academic systems across the region. Yet, notwithstanding such differences, it is clear that the countries of the region emerge as distinctive ‘laboratories of reform’, privileged sites for understanding the interplay of external and domestic influences in the reshaping of the HE sector. Drawing on the findings of our contributors, the second part of the article then turns to understanding the domestic mediation of the processes of Europeanization and internationalization, identifying a series of key factors broadly discussed in terms of structures, norms and actors. This special issue thus aims to refine our understanding of HE transformations and internationalization in a post-authoritarian context. It further contributes more generally to debates on Europeanization and policy transfer in the field.
Addressing challenges in higher education in the countries of Eastern Central Europe
The countries of Eastern Central Europe are often considered to share important similarities in many areas, including higher education, to the point of representing a distinctive region on the global map. To date, however, there is no consistent corpus of research available that would expound what these similarities are about exactly, what is their origin, or their relevance for the efforts to advance higher education in the respective countries. This paper is intended to make a contribution both in a theoretical order, by identifying and scrutinizing briefly some of the key conceptual elements that could help understand whether it is legitimate and useful to talk about Eastern Central Europe as a “region”, and also in a practical, policy perspective, by raising questions and putting forward recommendations regarding how to address challenges in higher education in this part of the world. More precisely, the paper focuses on the following questions: What justifies a discussion about Eastern Central Europe as a region? Are there common challenges in higher education throughout the region at present? What are they and how could they be addressed?
Policy Futures in Education, 2018
The article introduces a special issue of Policy Futures in Education on changes and challenges in educational policies and systems of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The countries in the region share some characteristics, such as their historical experience with the authoritariansocialist or communist rule and its impact on education policies, as well as their long-lasting economic semi-peripherality. Differences within the region are also discussed in the article: from macro-level economic gaps to relative dissimilarities of education systems' structures, as well as international assessment benchmarks. The articles in this issue present analyses of educational policies in Belarus, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Russia and Ukraine. A theme that emerges most clearly across these texts is the complexity of East-West relationships. Read together, the contributions serve as a call for a more nuanced and contextualized look at CEE. Transformation of educational systems that entails the interplay of past legacies and borrowed policies can bring about troubling outcomes, exacerbated by the entanglement of education in a wider agenda.
Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 2004
This volume is a collection of case studies that provide an in-depth analysis of the sudden and dramatic educational changes that followed the political, economic, and large-scale societal changes caused by the collapse of the Communist regimes in the early 1990s. Changes in education in five post-Soviet countries-Russia, the Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary, and East Germany-reveal that the removal of a rigid, highly centralized, and controlled infrastructure involved radical restructuring and was accompanied by enthusiasm as well as uncertainty and apprehension. By conceptualizing educational change as a dynamic process rather than an event in each of the five nations, the book makes a significant contribution to the scarce body of literature on post-totalitarian educational transition in Eastern and Central Europe.
The development of higher education in Eastern and Central Europe in the aftermath of recent changes
1991
Marxist-Leninist ideology's argument of historical determinism and its claim to conceptual superiority were put forward as the main rationales for the political legitimacy of the communist socioeconomic system in the countries commonly referred to as Eastern Europe. ~ This pretended superiority was also behind profound changes in higher education and the organization of science, which were introduced in somewhat se-Jan Sadlak (Poland/Canada). President of the international consulting firm EastEuroConsult in Toronto and a visiting scholar with the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Former Executive Secretary of the Standing Conference of Redors, Presidents and Vice-Chancellors of the European Universities (CRE) and staff member of UNE,~CO-European Centre for Higher Education (CEPES) in Bucharest. First editor of the CEPES journal Higher Education in Europe, his publications cover such issues as policy, planning, financing and governance of higher education in Eastern Europe and various OECD countries as well as relations between higher education and industry.
European Educational Research Journal. Vol. 16(5) (2017) 519–528, 2017
For most countries it is safe to say that higher education (HE) is the segment of the education system which has changed the most over the past 50 years. Expansion, massification, greater female participation, privatization, the diversification of programmes, and more recently internationalization and globalization processes have radically transformed national HE systems. In Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), these processes of change have not only been much more abrupt and fastpaced than in the West, but have also run parallel to all-embracing political, economic and social transformations and, in many cases, nation-building. HE policy-makers in the region have been forced to tackle essentially all contemporary challenges confronting western HE systems within a much tighter timeframe and under much greater political and economic strain. HE reform has run parallel to the democratization of political institutions, the introduction of capitalism and, more recently, European integration. To complicate matters, CEE universities simultaneously struggled with the restoration of university self-governance and autonomy, academic freedoms, and the renewal of the academic profession. In numerous cases, HE was also at the apex of complicated national language and identity issues.