BRATISLAVA, December 15, (WEBNOVINY) — Thirty-nine higher education institutions and universities are currently active in Slovakia, yet students with degrees from most of them are considered low-quality on the job market, says the Economic Policy Institute (IHP), an economic think-tank and an independent, apolitical and non-profit organization. It named five reasons leading to low quality of Slovak universities. “Academicians often react defensively to our criticism of insufficient practical dimension of university education. Instead of dealing with the gap between education and job market, they keep emphasizing the priority of academic freedom to conforming to demands of business,” says IHP manager for schools and education Lucia Klestincova.
IHP considers schools focusing at quantity instead of on quality to be a problem. Instead of selecting talent, universities practice mass recruitment without knowing the needs of the labor market. Education misses the practical dimension and one of the key problems is incomplete reform of the bachelor’s degree. The Economic Policy Institute considers wrong motivations of schools to be the main barrier to changes which could bring higher quality to education and thus improve the students’ ability to later find jobs. “A publicly funded university should, in addition to high-quality research, also bring up talent with specialization and competencies which the current economic situation needs,” explains Klestincova.
Lack of communication between schools and labor market results in a rising number of unemployed individuals with a university degree. Many of them have to find jobs with lower required qualification than they were studying for – which results in a shortage of jobs for high school educated applicants. IHP is convinced that it is impossible to expect quality from all university graduates when there are 70,000 graduates a year.
Many schools now don’t have any entrance exams, while several years ago some demanded their potential students to already know a large portion of first-year curriculum. IHP underlines that the mechanisms of financing universities do not take quality of new students or of the graduates into consideration and they also ignore numbers of children which are born and changes in the structure of the national economy. There also is no feedback on utilization of university education at the job market. Klestincova thinks that this situation only suits universities producing high numbers of graduates unable to find jobs in their fields and, on the other hand, makes implementing tools for supporting study of fields demanded by employers impossible.
IHP underlines that students are often theoretically overqualified after spending hundreds of hours studying, yet lack any practical knowledge and cannot apply theory in practice. Graduates with a bachelor’s degree also often have problems with finding jobs as although formally being separated from further degrees, many do not consider their degrees a completed university study. Students thus mostly continue studying for a higher degree.
SITA
