2.2: Romanian Higher Education

Alex Usher (AU): Hello. I’m Alex Usher and this is the World of Higher Education Podcast.

Romania isn’t a country that gets a lot of attention outside southeast Europe. But it should. And I am not just saying that because of my well-known overfondness for the country’s sausage rolls and pufuleti. In terms of economic growth, it lies only slightly behind Poland in its performance over the last 15 years, and in terms of politics it has an admirably liberal president in Klaus Iohannis and a political culture which is remarkably calm compared to neighbours like Hungary and Serbia. If you want a model of how entry into Europe can change a country for the better on multiple dimensions, you would be hard-pressed to come up with a better example than Romania.

And where does Romania’s higher education system fit into all this? Well, while it has some good universities, the system bears some significant scars from the Soviet era. The system does not really have anything like North American universities: Engineering faculties are separate universities known as “Politehnicas”, medical/pharmacy schools are always stand-along institutions, as are agricultural schools. The Big universities –Bucharest, Iasi, Babes-Bolyai in Cluj and University West in Timisoara are all basically just schools of Arts, Science, Business and Law. And it has had a very difficult time scaling up its system to western European levels: participation rates sit between about a half and a third of what they are in western Europe.

With me today is Romania’s Minister of Education, Ligia Deca. I’ve known Ligia for almost 15 years, back when she was head of the European Student Union, and I was delighted when she was named to cabinet nearly a year ago. Ministers in Romania are not generally speaking elected politicians – the country works on a model similar to that in France – and over the past two decades, an astoundingly high proportion of Education Ministers in Romania are university Presidents or Senate Chairs on temporary leave from their position. Ligia’s experience both as a student leader and a policy analyst means she represents the experiences of a wider and – how can I put this? – less obviously self-interested constituency than most of her predecessors.

We talk a lot about history in this podcast; in particular about Romanian higher education’s long and occasionally bumpy journey from totalitarianism to Europeanism. What I found fascinating in Ligia’s remarks was the role of international political, scientific and academic links in the outside world in making this trip as successful as it has been. Romania was seriously isolated in the years between 1971 and 1989. Re-integrating with the wider world was a serious task, and in this the country over-achieved. The role of faculty mobility programs, the Bologna Process, etc, were all key to Romanian universities’ re-integration into the wider academic world, at the same time as they acted as agents of political re-integration into a wider Europe.

Anyways, I could probably talk about Romania for hours, but that would be tedious and Ligia’s the better narrator. Let’s go to the interview.

Alex Usher (AU): Ligia, we have an international audience here. I'm guessing not too many will be familiar with Romania and its universities. Can you tell us what are the things everyone needs to know about higher education in Romania? What are the hidden gems people should know about?

Ligia Deca (LD): It's a system which drastically increased and then drastically decreased in the past three decades. Right now, it has a bit over 500,000 students. It has around 80 universities. Most of them, around 60 % of them are public, 40% are private, but the brunt of students are enrolled in public universities, about 86-87%. It's a system that is part of the European Union. So, it has this advantage of having diplomas recognized in the EU and in the wider European higher education area. It's a bit of a hub when it comes to medical education. We attract a lot of foreign students in that particular area. As any system, it is trying to find its way in a plethora of challenges, for example, demography, migration, superimposing pressures from the society, trying to do both the work that needs to be done to do well in international rankings and at the same time act as regional and local areas of competence and of being able to provide graduates which are easy to integrate in the labor market. So, it's a bit of a classic system in a country which is a relatively new European Union member, but at the same time is trying to compete in its region and serve the national and local needs. It's a bit the same, I think, everywhere, in a way.

AU: So, a normal European system is what you're saying?

LD: It's a normal European system, but with specific challenges that come about when you have a democracy, which is around three decades old and you are changing to a democracy after Romania had about 50 years of a totalitarian communist regime. There are still some centralization reflexes coming from that. So, it has an interesting governance dynamic.

AU: So how does that get played out? Because a democracy plays out not just at national levels or regional levels, but it plays out in institutions as well. Obviously, as you say, Romanian society has undergone a huge transformation over 30 years away from communist totalitarianism. But how big has the change been in Romanian academia? Has the pace of change been slower there or faster there?

LD: The pace of change here has been rather accelerated because as soon as the 90s hit, there was this pressure from society to democratize higher education and basically enroll as many young people as possible. We were perhaps the most elitist system in Central and Eastern Europe. Only about 5 percent of adults had a higher education background. So, you can imagine that the social pressure for enrolling more people was very high. So, that's one. Secondly, I think we have undergone a very fast Europeanization process. We've been trying to emulate some of the European models, but also some of the American Research Career models and prior to 2007, when we joined European Union, Romania was quick to adapt to the Bologna process structures. So, credit systems, three cycles, diploma supplements, recognition, quality assurance, and academic values like institutional autonomy, academic freedom. Everything was quickly adopted from a legal point of view, but also it was pushed through various networks of experts, stakeholders, and so on. And then, there was another decade more linked to international competition and universities trying to do well in terms of international cooperation and in international league tables, basically.

AU: So, lots of change and it may be faster and more quickly accepted in academia than elsewhere?

LD: On the surface, yes, but I think there are still tensions when it comes to academic staff. People have been quick to adopt things which sounded European even though they're not necessarily traceable in European documents. So, you had this this diffusion of European and international norms. But I think the culture of debate - academic debate over reforms that affect the academia has been created in time. I think it was easier, for example, to implement Bologna process reforms in Romania than in other systems which had a very long history of academic tradition. So, in a way, I think Romania became an eager adept of Europeanization trends. It was a bit of a laboratory of reform. And that shows. There are a lot of Romanians which are very present, for example, in the European Network for Quality Assurance Agencies, the vice president is Romanian, the European Student’s Union, the current president is Romanian. There are a lot of people which embraced European trends and international trends and tried to translate them and implement them in the national sector which is interesting.

AU: One way in which Romania led much of the world for the last decade was in dealing with demographic transitions. Today we have systems in many parts of the world dealing with declining youth populations, Korea, Japan, increasingly the United States. But Romania had a really hard demographic transition back in 1990 when contraception and abortion were re-legalized and birth rates dropped by about a third. And so, what that meant was 20 years later, you get to 2009-2010, and universities suddenly face a huge drop in the number of potential students. How did Romania's system survive that shock? And what are the lessons you think might be applicable to a place like North America or Japan?

LD: As said, it was a quick expansion and then a quick deflation. In the 90s, we had a lot of small private higher education institutions and an expansion of the infrastructure of the traditional universities. What that meant was that in 2008-2009, we had about a million students and then that quickly dropped to about half. What happened was that most private higher education institutions lost the people that would support them financially, so they closed doors. That's one. And second, many public universities learned to adopt a more managerial approach to the way in which they organized themselves. Universities, again, had to quickly adapt to that. One of the directions was also internationalization, but I wouldn't necessarily say that the number of foreign students replaces in anyway, the number of students that they used to have prior to this demographic contraction.

AU: So, you've alluded here to the role of the private sector. Of course, it expanded very quickly to meet demand and I guess you're saying it's collapsed. I think the number of students has gone down faster than the number of institutions, if I'm not mistaken. What’s the position? In that period where private universities were dominant, was it simply because there was no other option? What have been Romanian's attitudes towards private higher education? Was it very positive in the 1990s and it suddenly became less positive or did something else happen?

LD: What happened was that when the system democratized, there was a search for models, right? Traditional universities went back to their historical roots and to the European culture. Others which appeared in the nineties tried to emulate some of the private higher education institutions in the Anglo-Saxon world but not necessarily up to the same standards. So, because of the pressure of domestication, some universities especially private ones tended to award diplomas quickly and without necessarily checking all the boxes in terms of standards. So that meant that many of them became questionable, especially when the labor market after a few years started to react. Back then, I remember I was very young but I remember seeing job ads in newspapers in which companies said “we hire people with diplomas from this and that university and we don't want anyone with diplomas coming from private universities” which says something about the trust society had at some point. Then we had a reshuffling of the quality assurance system. So, we enforced minimum standards better. So that meant many of the programs and sometimes institutions were closed. That sort of coincided as well with the demographic contraction. So, that's why I said it was like a balloon, it quickly inflated and then it deflated. But the reason why it inflated in the first place was rather legitimate. Romania, despite the fact that socially people think that there are too many students in society, we're well under the EU average in terms of adults, 30 to 34 years old with a higher education experience. We're at 27% right now. If we want to have a value-added economy, it has to grow, but it has to grow sustainably.

AU: Let's turn to that question about a value-added economy because Romania has had one of the fastest and most consistent rates of economic growth for over a decade now. It's up there with Poland as the countries that are leading these days. But I'm curious about how much of that in Romania is what I would call “high tech growth” or “knowledge intensive growth”. And to what extent have universities been able to play a role in giving Romania more of a knowledge intensive economy?

LD: There are good practice examples and there are areas in which this link is not necessarily very solid. As you might remember, Romania has had the research and innovation system which was rather fragmented. The research infrastructures are not concentrated in universities like in other parts of the world. We had research institutes, which were supposed to do applied research so closer to the needs of the economy and of society. Then we had the Romanian Academy of Science Institutes, which were different. So, that fragmentation still remains. However, universities have increased their research infrastructures and have managed to attract academics, which do well in terms of research results. For some of them, especially not just technical ones, I would say even comprehensive ones, they have built very good partnerships with companies with budgets for R&D. And that meant, PhDs, programs for the needs, hubs, incubators, and so on. We still need to figure out some of these chains when it comes to transferring innovation and research results, there is still a sort of lack of trust, I would say, between universities and the labor market. They accuse each other of not doing enough to strengthen the link but we have now a new strategy for bringing together research institutes, universities, and a new law that says that we need to have a complete professional education dual route, which includes higher education programs in a dual system, like in Germany or Austria, in which half of the time is spent learning through working in different companies. So, it's the link is bound to get better, but I would say we still have some way to go in transferring the know-how of universities into concrete economic results.

AU: Ligia, I'm curious about one other big shift in Romania, and that is the degree to which the country has become much more open to the rest of the world and linked to Europe and the rest of the world. I understand Romania's just joined or is about to join the OECD. So that's another step, in terms of broader integration. My impression is that the impact joining the European Union and becoming part of the Bologna process was maybe the most important factor driving change in Romanian academia. But of course, it's not just joining other organizations. You've got your own internationalization strategy. I know you've been working on that for 12 or13 years now. It's a long time. In your opinion, what's the most important way that greater connectedness has affected Romanian higher education?

LD: As you said Romania has been very active in European formats, both EU, which is smaller, but also European higher education area, which is larger. We have 28 EU countries and we have about 49, if I'm not mistaken, countries within the Bologna area. Now Romania implemented Bologna reforms almost at the same time as it joined the European Union. So, almost at the same time in which it had access to EU funds - which were meant to help Romania's universities link to other European counterparts and that helped - European policies came also with European financial incentives. So, I think that helped the way in which Romania looked at reforms in general. Also, when it comes to how Romania approached geopolitical Europeanization, I think it was part of a wider agenda of European integration. The education chapter was the first chapter that was closed in the EU accession negotiations, which says a lot about how we placed the education sector in a wider Europeanization agenda. Now about the OECD, it's true, Romania is in the accession process. Actually, the first edition of Education at a Glance is being launched next week with Romania being part of it. So. that's a reason for joy. Also, the OECD has been present in recent years in various projects for technical assistance, especially when it comes to helping to design and roll out the new education legislation. So now we added another layer of international norms diffusion through the OECD on top of what Romania already had through the EU. Also, perhaps of importance is the fact that we have about almost 20 universities, which were part or are part of European university networks, which also helps because it generates mobility, joint degrees and institutional partnerships. So, it's also university to university, not just national level policymaking and international relations spill over into educational sectors.

AU: If I might, I'd like to turn the focus here now away from a national system of education. I want to talk about you. You're one of the very few people who has made the journey from student leader to political power. You're not the first, but there aren't many people, who've made that trip. You were head of the National Students Union, I think, in the mid 2000s and head of the ESU in the late 2000s. I think you and I first met in 2009 and you were still at ESU. What do you think those experiences bring to your current job? What, how does what you learned back then affect your current priorities and actions as minister?

LD: First of all, I think it helps with how I view stakeholder consultation. I've been in the shoes of stakeholder representatives and I know how hard it is sometimes to get your point across. I also am aware of the value of consultation when it comes to policies. I also know they can be very useful in disseminating policies and helping in the implementation process. So, I think that helps a lot. I think it makes me a bit more empathic to the needs of the beneficiaries, obviously. And I guess, you say I'm not one of the many, but I think in Europe, at least, there are quite a few political leaders in all areas, in all policy arenas, which are actually former student representatives. So, I guess, the student movement in Europe is quite good.

AU: Let me ask you that question the other way around though. Now that you've been in office for a year and you're inside the limits of power and you see the compromises that go into it. What is it you wish you could tell your student leader self from 15 years ago?

LD: Perhaps that getting the tone right and the time when you actually push for something is more important than the 50-page document that you present to a meeting. Perhaps just that sometimes policies and politics are done more people to people than based on 100 pages of reports. That's a lesson I recently learned.

AU: Okay. Finally, let me just take us 10 years into the future. It's 2033. What do you think will have change the most in a positive direction in Romanian higher education? And what are the things going on right now that give you the most hope for that future?

LD: First of all, I think we will have more balance when it comes to the drive for internationalization and the need to fulfill national and local needs. I think slowly universities are finding their place in order to support overall development, both at the local level and also at the national level. So, I think that's progressing quite well. Secondly, I think we will see much more connected members of academic staff in terms of international networks, I think. In a way, we force them through all the founding sources that have to do with co-authorship and international performance and European projects to socialize more in the European family and I think that will bring added value. And I also presume that once we interconnect some of the databases and we learn better and enhance the lessons that we had after COVID, perhaps we see the higher education system more adapted to the current generation which is something that we're trying here in Romania to research. We're trying to see how the current generation learns because we still test their literacy level based on text that they read and not necessarily YouTube videos or whichever way they get their information, podcasts and so on. And I think we need to have another look at that. I don't think they learned the way we learned.

AU: Not if my daughter is any indication. I'll tell you, that's all the time we have for today. Ligia, thanks so much for joining us.

LD: Thank you, Alex.

AU: It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers Sam Pufek and Tiffany MacLennan, and you, the listeners for joining us. If you have any comments or suggestions for new podcast topics or guests, please get in touch with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. Join us next week when our guest will be Canadian political theorist Daniel A. Bell, author of The Dean of Shandong, an intriguing new book, which in part chronicles his time as a senior administrator at a major Chinese university and provides a rare insider's perspective on how Chinese higher education really works. Bye for now.