New Legal Framework for Higher Education: The Slovak Republic
New Legal Framework for Higher Education: The Slovak Republic

Summary/Abstract: In May 1995 I was privileged to attend an OECD/IMHE workshop in Bratislava, in the Slovak Republic. The topic of the workshop was the principles upon which a law of higher education could be based, and the workshop was attended by a range of academics from Slovak universities, as well as representatives of the Ministries of Education, Finance and Social Security. The papers presented are published as Funding Higher Education in the Slovak Republic: Basic Principles. In addition to these, a range of foreign "experts" were present, from a range of European countries: Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, England, Scotland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. I put the word "experts" in quotation marks, not out of any lack of respect for those individuals, but to serve only as a reminder that it is extremely difficult to transfer such expertise from one national system to another. All of the countries represented among the participants have seen, over the last five to ten years, a move towards formula funding systems based on output measures. At one level, then, the agenda of the meeting was that Slovaks would set out the position in which their higher education system is at the moment. The foreign guests would then extol the virtues of output funding of higher education, on the basis that everybody can see the virtues of the system they are familiar with. The Slovaks would be moved to "modernise" their system, in the direction of becoming a responsive, market system. The actual events of the workshop were both more interesting and more complex than that, however, and illustrated a number of lessons of comparative study, which although frequently described, can with advantage be repeated yet again. The first of these is how resilient traditional ways of viewing educational systems are, when confronted with change. Even where the official ideology of a state has undergone radical change, as it has in most of Eastern and Central Europe, elements of the previous mode of analysis persist, either as contradictory elements in policy, or as unquestioned foundations upon which policy is built. The other lesson is that there is not a world-wide, or even a Europe-Wide trend toward educational markets. In each country the changes which can be described in those broad terms are subject to a local, nation specific political process, and the outcome will be modified by that process. Quite apart from anything else, this makes it impossible to see the end of the workshop as the end of the story. The ultimate goal was to be a new fundamental law of higher education for the Slovak Republic, but the eventual shape that takes will depend upon more than the deliberations of a few international "experts". Indeed, the political process, which was partially revealed in the workshop, is the hardest thing for the outsider to form accurate judgements on, and in the end will be decisive in framing the eventual law. What I will do here is set out some of the main themes of the discussion, the selection of input or output funding for higher education, the attitude towards market forces in funding higher education, and the attitude towards private institutions, all of which will prove important in the framing of the eventual fundamental law on higher education. This will leave the way open for two possible future developments; the examination of the eventual law against these themes and against the framework set out here, and a comparative study looking at the way similar issues find expression in different countries, e. g. the Slovak Republic and the Ukraine.

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