Reproduction of the 'State Nobility' in Eastern Europe: Past patterns and new practices

This article discusses old and new, emerging patterns of elite production in Eastern Europe following the conceptual framework developed by Bourdieu for the French case. It is argued that one of the fundamental characteristics of the Soviet pattern of elite production was the systematic destruction of cultural capital. More recently, it took the form of affirmative action providing privileged access to higher education—primarily professional schools in engineering—to students with collective farm, industrial and military backgrounds. It is argued that the lack of legitimate means to accumulate various forms of capital, including cultural and symbolic, has been one of the reasons for current corruption and the development of double moral standards in the post state-socialist countries. The privatization of the State assets after 1989 is seen as the climax of this process. The new elite, consisting largely of former second-rank party bureaucracy legitimized through the privatization, is now looking for means of capital accumulation, including training their children in a closed higher education sector. The large number of fee-charging programs, particularly in law and business, established in Eastern Europe during recent years is considered a response to this demand. This has, however, fragmented the formerly unified higher education systems and questioned the role of the State as the provider of higher education and guarantor of its quality. A solution to this is often sought beyond the borders of the nation-state. Whether this supports the widely spread globalization discourse is yet to be studied .     

Three bolognas and a pizza pie: Notes on institutionalization of the European higher education system

Quietly, without attracting too much attention from educational sociologists in Europe, a massive process has been underway for five years that is expected to revolutionize European higher education to an unprecedented extent. Launched by a number of European governments and subsequently taken over by the European Commission, the so-called Bologna Process is expected to boost European higher education to the top of the world higher education markets by 2010. This article looks at the history of the Process and its connections to the process of constructing the federal Europe, and analyses its three agendas: cultural, political and economic. In the final section the issue of institutionalizing the European higher education system is discussed and problematized. It concludes that the contribution European intellectuals have made to the project is both sociologically naive and intellectually irresponsible.     

Market as metaphor in central and East European higher education

Markets constitute the very centre of the post-communist reforms in the countries of Central and East Europe and the former Soviet Union. The two alternative approaches available for framing the market reform conceptually are, however, both inadequate. Those in favour of revolutionary theories fail to see the strong inertia of the academe and its desire for stability. Proponents of evolutionary theories of market reforms do not recognise qualitatively new relationships in many areas. Those eager to demonstrate the success of the market reforms as well as those presenting the success of the centralised higher education in a number of areas fail to realise the lack of legal framework for market reforms and missing political decisions on which the reforms could be based on. This article discusses the role of labour markets, markets of degrees and qualifications as well as the market of educational services as related to higher education reforms. It is proposed that downsizing the State has shifted many of its previous functions to random, often external agents. This creates a meta-level market - the market of market reforms in higher education. Through this quasi market formerly unified higher education systems and even institutions are broken into segments often ignoring each other's existence and seeking individual short term goals. As a result markets' pressure on higher education has taken extremely aggressive forms limiting access to quality higher education while the systemwide enrolment is rapidly growing through theactivities of new low calibre universities and diploma mills.     

Recent trends in Estonian higher education: Emergence of the binary division from the point of view of staff development

Conclusions The academic standing of the staff working in vocational higher education must be judged as unsatisfactory according to two possible criteria: the traditional criteria, which are derived from the universities operating within the previous unitary higher education system; and the criteria outlined by the bill of the Law of Higher Education Institutions. The latter derive from the same historical institutional pattern.There are many reasons to conclude that, academically, in most fields of study, the new institutions do not reach the level of the old ones. However, the mission of the new sector—the second-rank academic institutions in the eyes of the traditional academic community—is at least debatable, if not mistaken. The public university sector appears to be in deep crisis, with academics so attached to the Humboldtian university that they ignore the claims for social relevance in education.⁸ This is further complicated by deepening financial hardship.Using traditional criteria, it is possible that Estonia will be left with two socially irrelevant higher education sectors, instead of one functioning sector. It is also possible that the second sector, which does not fit these criteria, will be eliminated. However, the fault does not lie wholly with the dominance of traditional university attitudes. It also lies in a lack of vision on the part of the new institutions. As children of the proletariat society, they fail to recognise their vocational orientation as a benefit, and instead try to hide it. They are developing theoretically overloaded four- to five-year study programmes. None of these institutions has solved the problem of balancing the requirement of employing 50 per cent faculty full time and maintaining a satisfactory academic level. The need to demonstrate that part-time employees may actually benefit the vocational sector has not yet been understood.⁹ As long as the sector continues to accept the rules forced upon it by the old universities, it probably has no useful role in Estonia. Its institutions, especially the public institutions, cannot compete with the traditional universities in academic fields. The universities, on the other hand, are beginning to understand that the policy they proclaimed some years ago, which was based on the clear distinction between two sectors on the German pattern, does not work in a small country with very limited resources, and an inheritance from the previous regime of a large university sector with an enrolment rate of more than 20 per cent of the age group. The universities have agreed to offer their own non-degree courses at diploma level, and now seriously threaten the small new institutions. From the financial point of view, the universities' expressed desire to swallow the small vocational institutions is beneficial since the small institutions have no clearly distinct role of their own.The private vocational higher education institutions do not conceal the fact that, according to their own vision, they have little place in the vocational sector. Some of them would like an official status equal to that of the universities, the right to offer graduate and postgraduate courses as well as diploma courses, and the registration of their diplomas and certificates on an equal basis with the public universities in the Register of Diplomas and Certificates at the Ministry of Culture and Education. In other words, they are interested in becoming fully accredited universities. This increases competition for students and—given the Estonian mechanism of public financing of higher education based on the number of students admitted provided by the Ministry of Culture and Education¹⁰—there will be less money for public universities. Here lies the origin of the principle that the universities are established by parliament and the vocational higher education institutions by executive action by the government.The existence of the new sector is seriously threatened. The current pattern of postgraduate studies has blocked the preparation of a sufficient number of research-degree holders, even at master's level.¹¹ The new institutions cannot train their own faculty. The recent experience of Concordia International University—which depends greatly on staff with bachelor's and master's degrees from the United States, who form some 80 per cent of the faculty—demonstrates that the participation of first- or even second-rank Western academics in Estonian higher education can never be very high. If the system cannot accept experienced local staff for legal appointments in the vocational sector, unless they have a research degree, these institutions will not survive for long. Society will be back to the position where there are a large number of underpaid or unemployed academics, but a shortage of qualified individuals who could be self-employed and capable of running small and medium-size enterprises.     

“Nobody Can Better Destroy Your Higher Education than Yourself”: critical remarks about quality assessment and funding in Estonian higher education

This paper is devoted to the controversies surrounding higher education reform in Estonia. The main stress is put on the mechanism of quality assessment and assurance built into the bill of the Law of Higher Education. Owing to a significant conflict of interests between the HE institutions and the inability of any national level body to draw system‐wide policy, the bill has been discussed for four years and the parliamentary vote postponed several times. This has severely limited the development of democratic decision‐making processes in Estonian higher education. By now the traditional Soviet style of extremely centralised quality assurance has been dissolved in both higher and secondary education. In the new bill the term ‘educational standard’ is used several times: however, the content and origin of such standards remains unclear. From the comments of leading Estonian educationists, it is possible to conclude that there is a hope to copy ready‐made standards from some of the Western European countries. For this author the value of that solution is debatable. The last issue to be discussed in the paper is the idea of using relegation to the vocational sector as a punishment for poor performance. The author sees the roots of this kind of approach in the traditional underestimation of any kind of vocational education by the university community.     

The rise of the transnational capitalist class and World Bank 'aid' for higher education

This article looks at globalisation as a process of replacement of the global political order of nation states with the global economic order of transnational corporations. It is argued that this process carries far-reaching consequences, in which a growing number of spheres, including education, are subjected to the interests of the global economic order. Under the disguise of global economic development activities the new world system strives towards maximising the short-term profits of the transnational capitalist class. Following Sklair's global systems theory, this article looks at the World Bank as a transnational organisation. Based on recent World Bank higher education reform loan projects in Eastern Europe, it is argued that the primary outcome of the World Bank loan projects is the redistribution of the resources of the so-called 'recipient countries' to the transnational capitalist class.