Table 6 - uploaded by Adrian Miroiu
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In this article we investigate both the evolution and the current state of the public policies regarding student subsidies in post-communist Romania. We look into how the criteria on which student subsidies are distributed reflect an “equity” or a “quality” approach. This normative perspective is completed with a statistical account of the categori...
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This work paper is focused on the evaluation of university engagement in innovation (the
third mission of university), and aims to establish the main directions for improving the current systems
used to evaluate this university function in Romanian Higher Education. In the first part of the paper a
general overview on models and indicators for eval...
Citations
... To the extent that there is grant-based student aid, it is distributed via a block per-student grant from the government to institutions, with the institutions responsible for identifying recipients and distributing the aid. However, there does not appear to be any centralized reporting on recipients (Proteasa and Miroiu 2015), so there are no national statistics on student grants (though Alexe, Haj and Murgescu 2015 is a valiant expert to show light on what is known about these awards). And, since the state has chosen not to implement a program of student loans, there is no data to use for international comparative purposes. ...
This article uses a new global data set on higher education enrolments and finance covering 56 countries and well over 90% of the global higher education sector by enrolment, in order to examine the Romanian experience in higher education since 2006 in both a regional and a global comparative perspective. These comparisons highlight a few key facts about Romanian higher education, in particular: how different the institutional typology is compared to others in the region, how unprecedented the collapse in enrolments in the years after 2009, and how few resources, either public or private, the country invests in higher education compared to either a continental or global standard. The implications of these facts for Romanias future economic growth are briefly discussed.
... Student protests peaked in 1995, which saw the biggest such event in the country's post-communist history, with over 20,000 students and additional labor unions taking part. The size and frequency remained comparatively high in the second part of the nineties and the early 2000s, a period which researchers have shown to be plagued by inequalities in access to higher education at a time of expansion in enrolments (Proteasa and Miroiu 2015). Starting around 2001, protest activity indeed fell dramatically in size as well as frequency, lending some contextual support to the disengagement thesis. ...
While introducing the four contributions to the special issue "Students, their protests, and their organizations: exploring old gaps and new evidence", we link them with influential literature on students' protests and their organizations. The 'old gaps' refer to the long-standing divide between two traditions of research in students' collective action: social movements and organizational studies. The 'new evidence' refers to the finding that studentship is not conducive to protests (Oana 2019a), while the father's education is a strong predictor. While the 'agentic' character of studentship is one important presumption behind many arguments making sense of campus unrest, this finding does not invalidate it as such, but rather indicates that selection to higher education, and not campus socialization, may be conducive to this form of political participation.
... Distinctions between private and public higher education are fluid, both in general and in CEE particularly, as public HEIs often attract private resources and vice versa (Duczmal, 2006;Enders and Jongbloed, 2007;Kwiek, 2012;Proteasa and Miroiu, 2015). We will not enter into details regarding theories of privatization; instead, for the purpose of this analysis, we limit ourselves to positing two ideal types at the extremes of the public-private spectrum and operationalizing them in terms of higher education funding mechanisms. ...
... Thus, we conceive of the private ideal type as an organization run by non-state actors, which receives no support from the state in terms of either direct funding of educational costs or indirectly through student support schemes. Due to reasons of parsimony we refer to the most substantial and common (thus, adequate for comparison) forms of student support in the Romanian context: grants, loans and scholarships (Proteasa and Miroiu, 2015). The public ideal type resembles quite well the arrangements inherited from the communist regime: fully subsidized education, complemented by various additional support schemes. ...
... The second one, of rising rivalry, is placed in the period before 2004. Recent accounts (Kwiek, 2012(Kwiek, , 2016Proteasa and Miroiu, 2015), corroborated with the trends in Figure 1, suggest the level of rivalry between the two subsectors will increase significantly in Romania and Poland, the countries with the largest share of private in total matriculations. ...
This article adds a political perspective to the phenomenon of higher education de-differentiation, by building on Gary Rhoades’ neo-institutionalist account. Diversity is operationalized on a hallmark dimension for Central and Eastern Europe: the public–private divide. Higher education is conceived of as a structured organizational field and its institutionalization in Central and Eastern Europe is surveyed in a comparative approach, focusing on the institutions governing the competition for (tuition paying) students and the normative images of higher education (accreditation, quality assurance, classifications and rankings). Critical junctures are identified in regard to the structuration and re-structuration of higher education in Romania, and the agency of the ministers is traced in relation to their academic background. The article builds on evidence from studies of system-level diversity or differentiation in higher education, the structuration of higher education as an organizational field, and the more recent empirical accounts on the impact of the agency of academics in policy formulation in Central and Eastern Europe (especially those in office as ministers of education).
... Student protests peaked in 1995, which saw the biggest such event in the country's post-communist history, with over 20,000 students and additional labor unions taking part. The size and frequency remained comparatively high in the second part of the nineties and the early 2000s, a period which researchers have shown to be plagued by inequalities in access to higher education at a time of expansion in enrolments (Proteasa and Miroiu 2015). Starting around 2001, protest activity indeed fell dramatically in size as well as frequency, lending some contextual support to the disengagement thesis. ...
Measuring the university research performance has been an important focus of the higher education policies in past decade in Romania. In the present study we considered alternative methodologies for evaluating quality of research in the faculties of medicine. We set to compare the perspectives of past official evaluations with alternatives based on h and g indexes of the academics within these faculties and subsequent successive indexes and averages. We analyzed the distribution of the values of the individual h and g indexes and we rejected the universality claim hypothesis, according to which all university h- and g-index distributions follow a single functional form, proportional with the size of the universities. However, using the Characteristic Scores and Scales approach, we show that the shape of distributions is quite similar across universities revealing the skewness of scientific productivity. Given the high skewness of all distributions, we conclude that all three collective aggregation rules considered, averages, h- and g-successive indexes fail to provide an accurate measure of the differences between the individual academics within the six medical schools, and fail to provide scientific achievement incentives for the wide majority of the academic staff within the analysed faculties.
... Although there is a trend at the level of national student federations towards an increased social sensitivity (Proteasa and Miroiu 2013), the hierarchy between need-and merit-based aid has not yet changed significantly, and the pattern established in the late 1990s has remained relatively constant over time. So, while meritocracy and social support are not necessarily dichotomous (Haj 2014), the current scholarship system forces universities to choose between rewarding academic performance and supporting the low-income students. ...
Student support schemes are one of the main policy instruments that can be found in the European Higher Education Area which aim to enhance equity and help those with an underprivileged background to acquire an university degree. Access to higher education is significant because at individual level it leads to higher income and a better social status, while its absence is a pathway to social polarization. As education inequities lead to social inequities, the lack of national policies for reducing the social gaps (or inefficient implementation of such policies) creates the context for higher education to contribute to the entrenchment of inequalities between different social groups. In Romania, household income of families where the head of the family has a university degree is almost three times higher than in those where the head of the family has only primary education. This article assess whether Romania’s existing student support schemes, as one of the main tools to improve access and participation to higher education, are relevant in terms of public efforts to meet the social need of specific under-represented groups in Romania. In this context, the article looks both at the scholarship system from a national, legislative and implementation perspective and also the living cost with an emphasis on the student body characteristics.
