2011/II. szám - Felsőoktatási marketing
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Foreword
Universities have undergone a major transformation throughout their centuries of existence in response to changes in the social context or scientific paradigms. These overall changes appear as dilemmas that may give birth to future trends but decision-makers understand them primarily by their immediate effects on present alternatives. Market competition on the one hand and fulfillment of public objectives on the other is a dilemma of this sort in Hungary and worldwide today. These considerations result in possibly contradicting objectives or tasks of actors in HE. In studying this we have the questions whether Hungarian HE institutions are prepared to fully understand market demands and if they integrate their answers at a higher, strategic level to their functioning?
Diverse intentions for tertiary studies are monitored continuously, and every institution provides increasingly specified information about their training programs to their audience. But higher education marketing means a lot more than this. It is a special tool to set goals and evaluate organizational processes in the dimension of HE institutions that is defined by the market. In our focus section we show that it is rare to have a marketing view that influences inner processes (e.g. strategic planning, quality management) to a great extent in Hungarian HE institutions. Their changing functions clearly show in the mean time that HE institutions may become important nodes in global knowledge networks, having strategic cooperation with firms, governmental and non-governmental actors. And this is not a synonym of a self-serving "marketisition" but expresses the growing importance of the non-hierarchic relations of cooperation and competition for HE institutions.
Our workshop papers favorably add further aspects to the theme in focus. We follow an attempt to describe elite among students in new ways within the profoundly changed context of massification in higher education. We have found here that not even "elite" students regard HE as an ivory tower that is closed to society. We also analyzed a wider circle of available data on how graduates are related to their old institutions and what is their place in alumni networks. International student mobility was revisited as a function of the Bologna changes. We invited a case study to analyze the regional role and conditions of a university, showing a good example for the intimate relations between a HE institution and its surrounding region on our guest pages.
Our present issue thus invites the Reader to look at the institutional adaptation processes from a market perspective and on the background of long term changes in the function of HE.
Paszkál Kiss
editor-in-chief
- 1. Előszó, tartalom
- 2. Foreword
