After the democrat-liberal coalition has won the elections of 2004, I was expecting some major changes in the government’s politics, as the former social-democrat ruling has kept the education system in a continuous chain of experiments, annual changes and lack of long-term planning. Therefore, I studied the new government’s plan regarding education policies for the next 4 years. (It is available online in PDF format and Romanian language on the Romanian Government’s website.)

And I was not happy.

Firstly, it’s vague — doesn’t name institutions or governmental bodies responsible for each action and there are no specific, measurable targets. Secondly, it sounds too good to be true; it looks as if it is based on a thorough analysis of the current situation by a few reputable research agencies or at least its own research, however it doesn’t name current weaknesses it addresses and the specific measures to repair them. All in all, it’s more of a political statement to improve the image of the governing coalition rather than a thorough analysis, a list of specific targets and a plan of measures.

The programme speaks frequently about rural education and how it should be improved. I can only admit that the education in rural areas often makes one think of an underdeveloped country. Schools are in poor shape and insufficient, unsanitary, without heat or even glass sheets mounted in the windowframes. Even my tiny personal collection of books is more than what those children have access to in the village “library.” The government plans to rebuild these schools, to provide transportation for students in rural areas to and from school (some have to travel a few kilometers to the school in a nearby village) and to provide housing and transportation for professors and educators. All this by allocating 6% of the GDP. Compare it to the current allocation of 2% of the GDP for education, which barely covers the salaries and minimum investments. How will it be financially possible? I don’t think anyone in the government thought that far.

Rural education gets the spotlight, numerous actions are prepared for repairing this deficitary area of the education system. In my humble opinion, this “positive discrimination” is not a good idea. The world has seen the results of positive discrimination in other countries, which have led to a minority obtaining more rights and advantages than a majority. Establishing certain advantages to investments into rural education is good, but not if it affects the higher-quality education in cities and university centres across the country. They may be taking the first step towards patching the rural education, but also undermining the high-performance urban education.

The programme emphasizes continuous education and investing in educators, instructors and professors through better training instead of increasing wages. OK, I’m fine with this, but could they be more specific? Why aren’t these investments in training correlated with establishing higher standards for the quality of education they provide? I’d really like professors to be continuously tested and kicked out of the system if they fail to meet minimum requirements, especially in their field of specialty.

This comes hand in hand with my next problem: the unclear status of the student. So far, the student is the passive receiver of education as the state provides it through schools and universities. The student has no mind of its own and is there to listen, obey and shut up. Hello, people, this is the 21st century, will you dump your middle-age ideas and catch up? The student is the paying customer of an institution which provides training services to him or her! Even that it’s not the student that actually pays for these services but his or her parents through the taxes they have paid for years, it doesn’t matter: the student is the reason these institutions exist, and his or her will is a command to the institution. This is the only way to make education competitive in terms of quality. And the government refuses to place the students to the top level and keeps the old hyerarchy of professors doing as they please.

Here are some other bad ideas. Transferring the university dormitories and canteens from state ownership to private ownership will not make them better and cheaper; instead, the government will only lose control over the management of these facilities and instaurate local private monopolies in terms of housing and board for college and university students. Stating that a nation-wide system of evaluating students’ performances will be created is not enough; who will create it, how, what is the deadline, who will be consulted about the principles governing this system? Computer classes are mandatory in schools now, especially in rural areas; but, the government forgot that most professors are clueless about computers and that many villages don’t have electricity, telephone lines, gas pipes, running water and sewer yet, so a computer lab is really an impossible dream. Not to mention that nothing is being said about public acquisitions of such computer equipment and how will private computer resellers have equal access to winning contracts to supply these computers. Universities are still unable to benefit from the experience of industry professionals by inviting them to sustain lectures to students, which is a big loss to high specialty programmes in economics or computer science, to name just two.

It’s definitely autumn. Shorter days, cooler air in the morning, and lots of students hurrying to or from school. I had my first day of classes today as a senior college student. Perhaps you’re not familiar with my long term experience with schools and universities. Given my appetite for learning, since 1997 I have passed through 6 universities (transferring from one to another ocasionally) and I am currently attending 3 of them at the same time. Grantham University provides long-distance education over the Internet in Computer Science. The other two are faculties of Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj Napoca, Romania. (No, it’s not pronounced “babes” meaning “hot chicks,” but “baabesh.”) One of them is European Studies Faculty, which is business studies with emphasis on European studies and economic affairs, a 4-year study program, and the other one is Economic Studies Faculty, which is business sciences, my major being computer applications for business sciences, a 4 1/2 year program.

Back to the story: first day of classes. This is the perfect example for my point in this message: lack of organization and poor management of an university. First year students block the hallways because nobody told them what to do. Their schedule of classes is already displayed, with codes for each year, major and group, but what the students don’t know is the code for their major and what group they are in. So, they can’t attend any course because they don’t know which is on their schedule. Instead, they form a loooooong line at the registrars’ doors to ask “what’s the code of my group,” but the working hours are between 11am and 2pm and the registrars are particularily busy this week with putting together admission statistics for the dean. Was it that hard to print the code identifying the year, major and group next to each student’s name on the admission list, when that list was displayed after the admission exams? One missing column in an Excel sheet and students will be keeping registrars busy for a week to request this information individually.

Next on the agenda: applying the faculty seal on the grade notebook, as proof of being a registered student. Yeah, we still carry around tiny paper notebooks which are both grade report cards and student IDs, although professors write down the grade in the student’s notebook mostly on oral examinations. Mine is blank, and it doesn’t matter one bit. Well, I couldn’t get my grade notebook marked as valid today; have to go back on Wednesday, because the faculty seal was unavailable. How is it possible to have a single seal for one dean, two assistant deans, one secretary, six registrars, one accountant and one cashier?! Can you imagine the efficiency of this team, when every paper they work with needs a seal, and they have to run to someone else’s office to borrow the seal?

What bothers me most is how the management of this institution completely ignores technology. They’ve got computers, good ones and lots of them. They have the entire building wired with a gigabit network. But computers are used as typewriters and e-mail. Student records are still filed in paper archives, and searched through manually for each tiny piece of information. It drives me crazy! Pretty websites, yet completely useless. Key information, such as the group code, is missing. The class schedule is not displayed online. Grades are not displayed online; there is a project to implement electronic grade reports, but my guess is that the programmers got bored after a few hours and abandoned it. Online, I can find my grades from semesters 1, 2 and 5 and a mistyped name after completing 6 semesters, for one faculty; at the other one, I don’t even exist. Nobody bothered to write a student guide which explains how university works and all that. Everyone must figure everything out by themselves, while wasting a lot of time.

Why should I need to stay in line for half an hour with a handwritten request for whatever document I need, if I could fill such a request electronically, have the document printed automatically and the only human intervention would be for the registrar to sign and seal it? Why do I have to go in person for a grade report, and why can’t they mail me any documents? Why don’t they use their computer science students to create the software for student database management, and replace human queues and wasted hours with electronic queues? For crying out loud, it’s the 21st century, we study about databases and information age every day yet we are uncapable to automate and improve the relationship between the faculty and the thousands of students?

Call me an engineer obsessed with efficiency and optimization, but I cannot understand why I have to waste my day waiting in line because the faculty management doesn’t want to embrace technology because that would mean firing half of the staff.