CENTRAL EUROPEAN HIGHER EDUCATION AND GLOBAL PRESSURES: THE THREE ASPECTS OF GLOBALIZATION

Abstract

The present paper focuses on Central European higher education under increasingly global pressures as the thesis of the paper is that the main factors contributing to the current need of rethinking higher education institutions is connected with the advent of the global age. Although the countries of the Region do not feel these pressures in higher education yet, it is likely to be affected by globalization-related processes soon. Public higher education worldwide, including Central and Eastern Europe, is not a unique part of the public sector anymore: neither in explicit political declarations, nor in public perceptions, nor in practical terms. Higher education in the Region is doubly affected right now: by the local post-1989 transformations and by deeper and long- lasting global transformations. To neglect any of the two levels of analysis is to misunderstand a decade of failed attempts of reforming higher education systems here. The fundamental assumption about the globalizing world is the primacy of economy to politics and culture, and the primacy of the private (sector) to the public (sector); hence the expectance in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe of dramatic diminution of the public sector and of the scope of the public services provided by the state. Globalization is seen in the present paper as the political and economic reality that the countries of the Region will have to cope with. It will not go away, it will come - it has already come — to the Region, and stay.