Drop-Out in Romanian and Hungarian Higher Education – A Comparative Study
Előadó: Zoltan Zakota
Szerző bemutatkozása:
Zoltan Zakota is lecturer at the Partium Christian University, in Oradea, Romania. He is a co-founder of the departments of Management and that of Finances. At present, he is lecturing computer science, also application of informatics in economics and society. His main fields of interest are information and knowledge based society, the effects of ICT on society, economics and education.The author can be contacted at zzakota@gmail.com.
Előadás absztrakt:
Even in public education, the concept of student success is still unclear
in the world of mass higher education. Some of the researchers are
approaching the issue in a negative direction and are looking for an
explanation of student failure, drop-out, fall, study goals, or
disillusionment from their own institution, primarily considering the
reasons why different student groups are not able to make good use of the
expanded higher education and benefits. There are normative, formal
training requirements, but it is not by chance that researchers rarely
attempt to make them measurable. The external indicators of student
success are the successful placement in the state or the marketplace, the
recruitment at the workplace, and the provision of jobs by employers. It
is difficult to formulate forecasts in this area. Even at the time of
planned economy, employers did not meet the expectations of their
students. In the so called Beck era, in the beautiful new world of work,
the market value of a diploma a few years later is almost unpredictable.
It seems that due to the uncertain validity and low reliability of the
external indicators, the interest of international researchers is also in
the search for appropriate internal indicators. In my study, trying to
find and apply the right indicators, I analyze the drop-out in the field
of higher education in Romania and Hungary in a comparative way. The
motivational factor of the study is that the two higher education systems
started from the same situation, namely the Soviet model, at the time of
the regime change, but than they have traveled divergent routes over the
last three decades. I intend to examine how the specific changes affected
the dropout process in the two countries. I try not only to enforce
quantitative but also quantitative points of view, mainly based on
official statistical data.
