He reform of theHungarian higher education and the non-university sector

• Autor(a) principal: Dinya, Lászlo
• Data de Publicação: 1997
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.19/677
• topic: Education; Hungarian higher education

One of the most important weak points of the Hungarian higher education (just like the Central European higher education system) in the communist era was the extremely low access rate, roughly around 10% of the age group in the region. Such a system cuts the way before a large percentage of the age group towards post-secondary education and we cannot help thinking about political considerations of the governing nomenclature behind it. In some countries of the region the situation could be qualified even anticonstitutional since the respective constitutions stipulated: Each citizen, having graduated from the secondary education system has the right to enter the post-secondary education in a filiere appropriately chosen according to his or her capacities. Beyond this bottleneck at the access to higher education another common characteristic of the region higher education system were the inappropriate, if existing, links between education and economy. This bad relationship is especially dangerous in a period of rapid economical and social changes of the society. Regardless of the direction of the changes, the accelerated evolution of the society necessitates a high level of adaptability of the education and training system. Traditional higher education systems with their long cycle courses - Iet alone the sometimes obsolete curricula - are not able to satisfy the rapidly appearing needs of the new economical system. ln the same time on the traditional fields the good performance of the higher educational systems was weIl known. This gave the false justification for the higher education institutions to preserve their structure, profile, curricula, etc.