2012/II. szám - Esélyek a felsőoktatásban
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Foreword
Many people hold that providing equal opportunities is a myth and it is even more illusory in Higher Education. It is obvious that we are not all equally talented or motivated to study, which naturally determines our success in tertiary education. Most applicants enter to universities and colleges in a fierce competition in Hungary. Our authors in previous issues of Higher Education Analysis have repeatedly shown that selection pressure does not typically prevent access to HE but distracts the aspirations of those who have less resources. After the democratic changes a massification of HE happened and it was not the very best of each generation that entered into universities anymore, but paradoxically (for the main part caused by the hardness to reach even a baccalaureate) those who come from deeply underprivileged social circumstances have been deprived just as much from getting a diploma as before.
In what cases should the chances of acceptance be increased, which are the identifiable underprivileged or multiply underprivileged groups that should be helped? In our interview with the ombudsman of educational rights Lajos Aáry-Tamás and in our roundtable discussion with researchers and institutional administrators to the field we found that very diverse groups (of disabled, gipsy, and socially-economically-regionally disadvantaged youth) need the help of compensatory mechanisms. A compensation system works more or less at admittance. But their constraints remain even after when they enter into universities and start their studies. Therefore providing equal opportunity should also become a general leadership goal in HE institutions. Success in this field should belong to a positive image of the institution just as much as outstanding student performance and job market success of graduates do.
In the Workshop section of this issue which focuses on equality in Higher Education, Orsolya Garai's small analysis shows that prospective cut in state financing reaches "feminine" majors more than their "masculine" counterparts. On our guest pages, Ágnes Engler has surprising conclusions that having a family made students of continuing education to perform better and act more purposively, adding further colors to the picture of work-family conflict. About another "invisible" minority, Szilvia Nyüsti's detailed analysis points at the inflection point where the negative influence of parents undereducatedness establish a real obstacle to further studies of their children and she also shows the effects of institutions and programs in counterbalancing social disadvantages. The bachelor-masters shift is an internal selection point within HE studies introduced by the Bologna system. Student prospects at this crucial point are analyzed by two papers in the Focus section (by Kálmán Ertsey and Matild Sági, and by Zsuzsa Veroszta).
Issues of equal opportunity will become the responsibility of individual institutions in Hungary, we tried to help analyzing these problems and assessing already existing practice in response.
Paszkál Kiss
editor-in-chief
- 1. Előszó, tartalom
- 2. Foreword
