What will happen to Romanian’s educational system and labor market? Open debate

This article is NOT related to the main topic, but it raises issues that maybe other countries face. Feel free to skip this part if you don’t feel like reading.
But in case you read it, please be kind enough to post some comments and suggestions.

I will tell you about Romania’s educational system. Hopefully the country’s EU integration will spur some reforms and investments in the educational system, but for now, the circumstances look like this:


1. Most school are financed by the government => the funds that reach each school/college/university are not sufficient.
Schools have hardly been restored or updated with proper equipment. I remember having to pay “the school fund” in order to buy new benches, paint for the window frames and even white chalk.
In 2008 the education system received record funding: 6% of the GDP. Romania’s GDP is around 157 billion dollars (wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_GDP , last visited in 02/09/08). This means that education gets around nine and a half billion dollars. Now let’s compare this with some other countries in Europe, many of which compensate also with tuition (information taken from “Education at a Glance 2002, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development”, http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/ssdataset.asp?vlnk=6447, last visited on 02/09/08):

UK -4,7% of GDP =>133 billion $ towards education
Germany -4,7% of GDP =>171,6 billion $ towards education
Denmark – 8% of GDP => 28 billion $ towards education
France -6% of GDP =>170 billion $ towards education
Sweden -7,7% of GDP =>38,6 billion $ towards education
Austria – 6,3% of GDP =>26,3 billion $ towards education
Belgium-5,3% of GDP =>28,8 billion $ towards education
Netherlands – 4,8% of GDP =>38 billion $ towards education

2. Another issue in Romania is the low salary of the professors due to insufficient monetary allocation. This led to shortages in the educational labor force, but not only. I will enumerate some other negative effects:
2.1 A lot of brilliant professors relocate themselves, working for companies that pay decent wages, al least high enough to cover for their degrees.
2.2 Some professors that work for the state owned universities may be inclined to accept bribes
2.3 Quality of education decreases because the incentives to teach are very low, due not only because of the financial reasons, but also due to the student body (which I will discuss later on) and the lack of educational equipment.
2.4 The future supply of labor will be constantly decreasing, since students view this segment as a financial unattractive one.

3. Low student involvement. I will talk about this in the next fragment:

I finished my high school in 2003. During that time, the “trend” of studying abroad was really starting to catch up. Students hoped for something better, an environment that had the means and resources to allow somebody to evolve.

Reason for leaving: the Romanian educational system was and mostly still is a wreck, as I previously mentioned. Poorly equipped classrooms, lack of proper libraries, non user friendly and too theoretical oriented teaching materials, low scholarships compared to high costs of living, and especially the high corruption level that allowed you to pass any exam or obtain any Diploma just by sending “presents” to the right persons, all added up in creating a low incentive for mass students to have the desire to evolve academically. Exceptions applied in some cases, but the general thinking pattern was the following: why not party and hang out with friends instead of study impractical theories that I would either forget till the end of my University years or most of it never apply during my life? The knowledge that I will require for doing my future job will be taught to me anyways when I will get hired. And that job will probably not even be in the field I am studying… So why not relax, develop my social skills (because, after all, this is what present Romanian employers look for) and just cheat my way through the exams, or, if I have the financial means, talk to the professor between closed doors in order to try to come to some sort of a “compromise” that will benefit us both. And believe it or not, this is a very effective method to take the easy way through school.
These type of students will know how to talk and act much better than the students who had to skip all the social meetings in order to study; this “cheating” student will have the proper academic records (at least on paper) and, if this student is a sociable, fast learning and pleasant figure and has at least some left over brains in his head, it will probably be promoted much faster than the student who followed the rules and who will end up in a cubicle working for half the wage and putting double the effort and brain power.

So, I am asking you these questions:

Why is this technique of skipping most of the university educational period working so efficient? Why do those students who skipped school and became more “street smart” usually earn more than the students who followed the rules? Why do they get the good jobs, work in Western countries as delegates while their hardworking friends quickly end up in a cubicle at a multinational corporation being exploited? (this is not a general rule, but usually this is the case).

How could we change this trend? What should the government do? Private schools appeared, but most of them accept everyone as long as they pay the tuition fee which is about 1000 euros per year. They don’t want to risk becoming more demanding, because this way they will loose the tuition of the student they expelled.

Romania is slowly running out of experts in many fields, since most students don’t have such a solid background that enables them to grasp advanced issues in that particular area, plus no company is willing to spend on training, especially if it takes prolonged, more than expected, periods of time. And remember that this is the happy case in which the employees found work in the same field as the one they graduated in.
The remaining few experts are usually recruited by companies from the western countries through the help on an attractive salary (at least for an Eastern European), a very profitable strategy, since these firms save a lot of money that would have otherwise been spend on training.
How can Romania cover this shortage of specialists?