International Higher Education, Winter 2005

Legitimating the Goal of Educating Global Citizens

Snejana Slantcheva
Snejana Slantcheva directs PROPHE’s Regional Center on Central and Eastern Europe, Doiran 7 Street, Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. E-mail: slantcheva@policy.hu.

The emergence of private sectors in higher education is recognized by UNESCO as “one of the principal developments characterizing a systemic transformation of higher education in Central and Eastern Europe.” After the fall of the Berlin wall, private institutions sprang up across the region to fill gaps in the higher education landscape formed by the increased demand for higher education, the nascent market economies, and the priorities of a spawning civil society. Within several short years, the private higher education sectors in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe grew quickly, although unevenly, with student enrollments ranging from more than 25 percent of total student numbers in Poland and Romania and 22 percent in Estonia, to 14 percent in Hungary and 13 percent in Bulgaria, to 2 percent in the Czech Republic and less than 1 percent in the Slovak Republic. In Poland alone, 6 private institutions were registered by the end of 1990; by 2002 their number had reached 250. Private-sector enrollments of 50,000 students in 1994 climbed to more than a half million in 2001, amounting to almost one-third of the Polish student body. And between 1990 and 1993, around 250 institutions appeared in Romania.

Struggling with Social Acceptance
The rapid establishment of new private institutions within an initial legal vacuum soon invited questions concerning legitimacy. And despite the fact that, unlike the existing public institutions, these new private colleges and universities are untainted by the communist past, respond to various pressing demands of a transitional society, and embrace the major postulates of higher education reform—often with little or no direct use of taxpayers’ money—they still continue to grapple with social acceptability. A major factor influencing social recognition is expressed in the main goal that these institutions pursue.

Shared Characteristics
The overriding priority of private institutions of higher education, both within the region and beyond, seems to be the development of human resources for states with multicultural civil societies and increasingly characterized by global economic interdependence. In the process of accomplishing this goal, private institutions across Central and Eastern Europe, as a group, exhibit specific common characteristics. They place the student at the center—thus focusing above all and teaching and learning, or the transmission of knowledge, as their core function. Different forms of pedagogical and technical innovation are complemented by practical training in programs that promise to produce a skilled, flexible, and critically thinking labor force. Research is conducted mainly to support classroom teaching. Very few of the private institutions train doctoral students. For example, out of 221 institutions in Poland, only 51 are entitled to offer master’s degree programs and only 2 to confer doctoral degrees, whereas the 7 Bulgarian private universities graduated 3 doctoral students in the 2002–2003 academic year. Involvement in the local and regional problem-solving agendas has also been a common feature.

With respect to their institutional profiles, most private institutions in Central and Eastern Europe offer a limited number of programs in fields demanded by the market—such as business, finances, banking, law, and economics—designed predominantly short-term degree programs, mostly professional and at the bachelor’s level. Although private institutions in some countries in the region outnumber public institutions—82 percent of all institutions in Slovenia are private, 82 percent in Poland, 63 percent in Estonia, 60 percent in Romania, and 52 percent in Hungary—most of these institutions are small, with weak infrastructures. Their corporate academic culture is somewhat diluted. A large number of their faculty are part time, usually coming from the larger, older public institutions. Many of their students (also representing a rather mixed group with respect to age and social status) are also part time, distance learners, taking specific courses or virtual classes. All this appears fairly common in global perspective.

A Shift in Goals
The teaching, learning, and professional orientation pursued by this group of institutions speaks to a very important shift in priorities within the bundle of the traditional functions of higher education, which include the pursuit of “pure” research and academic training (as a core function), general education, professional preparation, production of technically usable knowledge, and the promotion of cultural self-understanding. The shift of emphasis within the bundle of higher education functions exemplified by private institutions in the region takes place against the background of deep-seated educational values, formed above all by the philosophy of the modern German university and the integration of studies and research. Following the political changes in Central and Eastern Europe, this ideal has been upheld more than before. In most of the region, despite the separate research academies, research is declared a key mission of the university and also a high-priority requirement of the accrediting regulations.

As a result, of the value placed on research, the private institutions’ clear focus on developing human resources for the new regionally and globally integrated economies and knowledge societies has not been easily accepted across the region. The social acceptance of private higher education institutions will depend on their ability to address the challenges regarding their goals. Combining the search for truth and knowledge creation with the training of global citizens is a significant problem that these institutions will need to resolve. Committed as they are to human resource development, private colleges and universities must remain sites for the pursuit of truth, something that cannot be reduced to job placement but instead must promote the discovery of new scientific answers to the pressing problems of contemporary society.