| SUMMARY: |
While many of the current higher education specialists assess that the most significant event in higher education on the long run is expansion (Pusztai, 2015), one has to be sure that in some parts of Eastern Europe, and in Romania certainly, in recent years, tertiary education was affected by expansion followed by contraction
(Kwiek, 2013). The quick decrease in enrollment numbers which came after a correspondingly rapid rise in access produced many perverse effects on the functioning and also on the legitimacy of universities to fulfill their official roles. The disenchantment of aspirations of social ascension that came after the saturation of the demand for certain university diplomas – most of them in social sciences as will be quickly clear – had the ironic upshot of forcing stakeholders in the field to become more reflective about the expected results of university education. In simple terms, demand has become more careful about labor market outcomes: employers are increasingly critical about the capacity of Romanian universities to deliver specialists endowed with the knowledge and competencies required by their jobs while eventual students spend more time analyzing the career prospects of each field of study. As a consequence, demand for some fields of study has fallen, even forcing some of them
to close. This development is pressing academic managers to consider radical changes in the structure of educational supply and/or in the everyday conducts in universities including the ways of teaching and extra-curricular interactions on campus. |
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