Back in the 1990s, the refrain was that our higher education participation rates were too low by comparison with western parts of Europe. Let's throw the university gates open wide, they said at the time. Let the student numbers explode, so we can catch up at least in quantity, if not in quantity, it was said. Catch up with what? With the statistics. So student numbers grew, but a lack of money meant university infrastructure did not follow. What should we do? Set up courses that can take in many more students. And then new faculties, colleges, universities. Then universities started to merge. Wholly unrelated institutions were joined together, once again to promote efficiency. Colleges joined universities, huge conglomerations were born, often to the detriment of quality.
And now, suddenly, there are too many students, and they are not fit for the labour market. There are musicians, archaeologists and German philologists where we need manager-calculators. Some think the problem is with university administration, others with the universities' structures. But foreign models - because of divergent traditions - are not always adaptable.
But it's not just students - there are too many universities, suddenly, and education is expensive. But nobody mentions one thing: that virtually every village has its own college, and that there is an endless supply of artificial universities created by pasting together two institutions of differing quality. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the academic staff of the same four or five universities now teaches at most of the country's educational establishments. We have to accept that quantity has undermined quality. The real test of quality is not uncritically implementing ideas borrowed from the private sector, but the precise measurement of academic achievement. Nobody dares to say that certain institutions should be shut down at once.
You can argue about tuition fees. But they are no good for the purpose they are being used for. It is said that fees will make a student choose an institution carefully, assessing whether a degree from there is valuable on the labour market. I have no illusions. It is clear that a summa cum laude law degree from a new university is much more valuable in the justice system than a mere pass or cum laude from a well established university that provides a full grounding in the subject. These are difficult questions, of course, because you can imagine the reaction of an MP or party functionary when told that his city's "old" degree factory has to shut down.
In any case, it seems that the institutions which were formally accused of elitism, now that they have been forced to carry out mass education, are realising that they cannot do both at once. But, entranced by the numbers, they seem to have forgotten what Prothagoras said some 2000 years ago: Man is the measure of all things. But this measure seems to have got lost along the way.
ZOLTÁN GYENGE
The author is a university lecturer.