“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.