EDUCATION IN TRANSITION
Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.

Global Politician, NY
Jan 8 2007

October 2002 has been a busy month in central and eastern Europe,
at least as far as education goes. "Kliment and Metodius" university
in Skopje, Macedonia went on investigating forged diplomas issued
to its students – and staff – in the economics faculty by Bulgarian
diploma mills.

Similar allegations – of forged or hawked academic credentials –
surface periodically against politicians and scholars in all the
countries in transition – from Russia to Yugoslavia. Underpaid
professors throughout the region have been accused in the local
media of demanding – and receiving – bribes, including sexual favors,
to tinker with exam marks.

The denizens of central and east Europe are schizophrenic about
their education system. On the one hand, they are proud of its
achievements. According to the 1996 Third International Maths and
Science Study, The Czech Republic and Slovakia fared better than
Switzerland and Netherlands in mathematics.

Hungary and Russia beat Australia, Ireland, Canada, Belgium, Israel,
Sweden, Germany, England, Norway, Denmark, the United States and a
host of other Western heavyweights. The situation with science skills
was even better with the Czech Republic in the second place out of
41 countries, Bulgaria ranked fifth, Slovenia seventh, Hungary ninth
and Russia in the fourteenth rung. This stellar showing defied low
spending per pupil and high number of students per class in these
mostly poor countries.

But corruption is endemic, libraries and laboratories are poorly
stocked, state institutions are cash-strapped and certain subjects
– such as computer science, foreign languages, international law,
business administration, and even economics – are poorly taught
by Soviet-era educators. Hence the clamor for private and foreign
alternatives. Brain drain is rampant. According to government figures,
82,000 youths – 4 percent of its total population – left Macedonia
since 1991 to study abroad. Most of them never bother to return.

Foreign information technology firms are forced to open their
facilities to cater to their growing needs for skills. In July, the
first Cisco Certified Network Associate Academy on the Balkans was
opened in the building of the Bulgarian Industrial Association (BIA).

Neighboring countries, such as Italy and Greece, aware of Bulgaria’s
cheap but well-educated cadre, have set up bilateral cooperation
schemes to tap it. Italy now allows Bulgarians to spend six months
on work and study in Italian institutions. Both Uni Credito Italiano
and Bulbank are offering interest-free loans to the would-be students.

Bulgaria signed with Greece a 2 year cooperation agreement including
a student exchange program. The Serbian government submitted last
week 11 projects worth $164 million to be funded the Greek Plan for
Economic Reconstruction of the Balkan. Part of the money will be
spent on educational schemes. Turkey is eyeing Macedonia. In a visit
in august, the Turkish minister of education pledged to invest in
eastern Macedonia home to a sizable Turkish minority.

Foreign establishments are sometimes regarded by xenophobic locals as
cultural, social, and political beachheads. The excellent university of
Blagoevgrad in Bulgaria is only half-jokingly known as "CIA University"
due to the massive amounts of American funding and the number of
American lecturers. It happens to straddle the border with Serbia,
a one-time foe of the United States. The Central European University
in Budapest, Hungary, funded with hundreds of millions of dollars from
George Soros’ fortune, has been subject to head-spinning conspiracy
theories ever since it was founded in 1991.

But the most encouraging trend by far is the privatization of
education, hitherto the patronage fief of politicians, trade unions,
and state bureaucrats. According to The Economist Armenia had
last year 69 private institutions of higher education with 20,000
students. Bulgaria had 9 with 28,000 students and Hungary had 32 with
28,000 undergraduates. The record belongs to Poland – 195 private
institutions with 378,000 learners, one quarter of the total. Much
smaller Romania had 54 establishments with 131,000 pupils – one third
of all students in higher education.

Some of these private schools are joint ventures with enterprising
municipalities. According to Mediapoolbg.com, the newly opened program
of business administration offered by the City University in Pravets,
Bulgaria and the International Higher Business School plans to teach
management, e-commerce and information technologies.

The curriculum is subsidized by the US Congress and the Ministry
of Education and Science. For an annual fee of $2500, students will
attend classes taught by both Bulgarian and American lecturers and
receive a dual Bulgarian and American diploma. City University offers
both distance learning and classroom instruction in Poland, Romania,
Bulgaria and Greece.

There is an intra-regional demand for successful managers of
private educational facilities. The Regional Vice President of the
aforementioned branch of City University in Bulgaria is Jan Rebro,
a Slovak, who previously served as Chairman of College of Management,
the first private college in Slovakia.

Education in these parts is not a luxury. According to a 1999
government report about unemployment, less than 2 percent of
university graduates are unemployed in Macedonia – compared to more
than 40 percent of the unskilled. In July, the Bulgarian National
Statistics Institute published a survey of micro-enterprises, about
92 percent of all businesses in the country. The vast majority of
all the owners-entrepreneurs turned out to be highly educated.

Governments are aware of the correlation between education and
prosperity. The Serb authorities are offering 6-months interest-free
loans to buy school books and supplies. HINA, the Croat news agency,
published last month a government blueprint for countering the
declining numbers of high school and college students over the past
ten years and a drop in the quality of education. Only seven per
cent of the population ever attend college and just over one third
of these actually graduate.

But the countries of central and eastern Europe would do well
not to fall into the sequential traps of Western education. As
Alison Wolf recounts in her recently published tome "Does Education
Matter? Myths about Education and Economic Growth" (Penguin Books,
2002), an obsession with quantitative targets in education reduces
its quality and adversely affects economic growth.

Moreover, educational issues often serve as proxy for national
agendas. Years of bloody clashes between Macedonians and Albanians in
western Macedonia led, last year, following intense arm-twisting by
the international community, to the opening of the Southeast Europe
University in Albanian-dominated Tetovo. In a country still torn
by inter-ethnic strife and daily violent clashes in mixed schools,
the university is "committed to the Albanian culture, language,
and population".

About half its board is comprised of nationalistic political
activists. Bilingual education was always one of the chief demands
of the Albanian minority. Yet, the opening of the university in
February last year did nothing to forestall an armed uprising of
Albanian rebels.

Similarly, equal educational opportunities tops the agenda of the
4-5 million Romas (gypsies) in central Europe and the Balkan. Last
November, Save the Children, a charity, reported that two thirds of
Roma children never attend school. Most of the rest are shunted off
by hostile governments to special schools for the mentally challenged
and drop out by age 15.

One in thousand ever makes it past the bullying and the bureaucratic
hurdles to a university. Pressured by international public opinion and
the European Union, governments reluctantly allowed private groups in
the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia to acquaint Roma toddlers
with the indigenous languages so as to qualify them for a regular
primary school.

Finally, caveat emptor. Some "private institutions" – especially
distance learning diploma mills – front for scam artists. The quality
of instructors and lecturers – most of them moonlighting between jobs
in state institutions – is often questionable. Curricula are rarely
effectively scrutinized and controlled and there is no proper process
of accreditation. Annual fees are high and equal a few years to a
few decades of average pay. Links and joint ventures with foreign
universities help but cannot substitute for structured and continued
oversight.

Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. is the author of Malignant Self Love – Narcissism
Revisited and After the Rain – How the West Lost the East. He served
as a columnist for Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline,
and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business
Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe
categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia. Sam Vaknin’s Web site is at