Article

The issue of the relationship between higher education and the labour market/business community has been studied over time by different researchers. We can mention the recent studies conducted in a number of European countries: in France by Paul and Murdoch (2000), in Germany by Schomburg (2000), in Italy by Moscati and Rostan (2000), in Norway by Arnesen (2000), in Austria by Kellermann and Sagmeister (2000), in U.K by Woodley and Brennan (2000) and others. These studies analysed mainly the relationship between higher education and employment in statistical terms, but also in qualitative terms through aspects such as the abilities and skills graduates need in order to integrate into the labour market.

Saunders and Machell (2000) developed the neo-correspondence theory. It complemented the correspondence theory which was first introduced into the educational theory in 1975. The correspondence theory analysed social relationships between teachers and pupils in schools which would produce socialized work habits and attitudes, a process also called the hidden curriculum.

By contrast, the neo-correspondence theory promotes a correspondence between student experience in higher education and the workplace, not as a hidden curriculum but rather as an explicit curriculum. The new aspect in neo-correspondence theory is that it is concerned with originating generic skills instead of technical or specific skills using a “link curriculum” that will provide an image of what work is and is likely to be in the future. Research based on this theory showed that employers tend to place a high value on social skills, attitudes, motivation, broad knowledge and flexibility in recruiting graduates. In other words, according to this theory higher education should provide experiences which familiarise students with the social and organisational contexts in which the traditional intellectual capacities are to be applied.

In this context of transforming the role of higher education in society this contribution tries to characterize the relationship between higher education and the work place in Romania as seen by the business community. The contribution will present the changes that took place in higher education after 1990 and the perceptions of the business community about higher education systems and graduates as results of an empirical study conducted in Romania.

A number of changes took place in Romanian higher education after 1989. The first major change in higher education was the emergence of private universities. The phenomenon appeared immediately after the fall of communism in a context of high demand for higher education (as places in universities were centrally planned and limited prior to 1989) and little legislation in this respect. There were a number of motives considered to contribute to the increase in the demand for higher education: a) there was a large number high-school graduates from past generations whose aspirations to get into an university were not fulfilled prior to 1990 due to the limited number of places and the tough entry examinations; b) new opportunities arose by the opening of Romanian society which attracted more people to study further in order to be able to benefit from them; and c) having a university diploma was seen as a prerequisite to get jobs in the labour market, jobs that could be obtained on the basis of networks and connections but for which the basic requirement was to have a university diploma. Private initiative was first to respond to the increased demand. The first private universities were established in 1990, and the first legislation regulating private higher education was enacted only in 1993. Under these circumstances newly established private universities had no quality requirements to comply with. Private universities were the result of private initiatives of individuals and group of individuals who, starting 1990, designed and organized courses in whatever available places (cinema halls, canteens, etc) with mainly sub-contracted professors from state universities and called themselves universities. The level of quality of the educational services depended on the organisers and on whatever the market was prepared to accept. Given the scarcity of the past on the one hand and the strong desire of getting a higher education the market accepted any service that would provide a university diploma. Only lately, processes like authorization and accreditation were initiated. Still, these universities continued their activities and “produced” the first generation of private university graduates in 1994.

The entire education system, state and private institutions, experienced growth and reorganization. The number of public higher education institutions increased from 44 in 1989-1990 to 57 in 1999-2000. At the same time, the number of private higher institutions grew even faster starting from 0 in 1989 and reaching 63 in 1999-2000 according to the National Commission of Statistics and 83 according to the Ministry of Education and Research (MER)[2].

The total number of students enrolled almost tripled in the 12 year period. While enrollments in state institutions increased by 95%, the larger increase was due to the establishment and growth of private higher education institutions.

Sources: Statistical Yearbook (2000), Ministry of Education and Research (2002).

Presently about 30% of the students enrolled in higher education study in a private higher education institution. Table 2 presents the evolution of student enrollments between 1989 and 2001.

Sources: Statistical Yearbook (2000), Novak, Jigau, Brancoveanu, Iosifescu and Badescu (1998), MER (2002)

Another aspect of higher education restructuring after 1990, is the higher degree to which private higher education responded to the structural market demand as compared to state higher education. Prior to 1990, engineering fields were in high demand as Communist Party policy at the same time was “to develop the multi-lateral developed Romania” by self-producing as many manufactured goods as possible. To fulfill this goal society needed many engineers, a need that was reflected in the higher number of study places available in engineering as well as in the better position of engineers in society (higher wages, better access to top company positions). After 1990, there was an over-inflation of engineers and the demand for qualifications in economics[3] and law[4] increased. Table 3 presents how demand increased most in fields such as law,

Table 3: The structure of higher education by field (1989, 1994,1998, in percent)

economics and humanities. These were the fields in which most of the private universities developed.

The percentage of students studying economics in public universities has doubled between 1989 and 1998, while the law enrollments more than doubled in the same period. At the same time private higher education took advantage of the financial and organisational deficits of state higher education by immediately absorbing the excess demand in these fields (Edinvest, 2000). The enrolment numbers by field in private higher education show that law has the highest percentage (38%) of students followed by economics (37%). The development was also supported by the fact that for these fields no industrial equipment for laboratories is needed as in engineering, so investment costs are lower.

An important element in the changes of higher education in Romania is the introduction of an external quality evaluation system through the accreditation process. Both the state and the private higher education institutions are subject to accreditation and re-evaluation every 5 years. The accreditation process has two phases, the temporary authorisation after two years or operation and depending on a numberof conditions which must be fulfilled, and the full accreditation which can be granted two years after the first cohort of students has graduated and also depends on a number of additional conditions.

In 1993, when the accreditation law was enacted the quality evaluation process took place in a discriminatory way. All public higher education institutions that were operating before 1990 were automatically accredited while newly established public higher education institutions and the private higher education institutions were subject to the procedures of accreditation. In 1993, 168 private higher education institutions asked for temporary authorization. No statistical evidence was available about these institutions until 1996 when the declared number of private institutions was 36. We assume that the rest did not receive the temporary authorization to operate. Most of the latter closed down but some still remained and function illegally up to present. In 2002, there are about 20 private universities without authorisation that operate nevertheless (Damian, 2002).

The 8 private higher education institutions accredited in December 2001 through approval of the Romanian Parliament were mainly those that managed to substantially improve their material base and have their own buildings (classrooms, dormitories). Even though they are fully accredited and, according to the law, have the right to organise independently their own examinations and licencing/graduation, academics from the public universities have to be members of the examination commissions at private institutions.

In 1995, a new education law was passed, Law 84/1995. It was revised in 1999 through Law 151/1999. The main contribution of the latter was the launch of higher education reforms by granting more academic and financial autonomy to higher education institutions. Between 1998 and 2000 there were numerous other Government decisions, orders and ordinances enacted to help the implementation of the reform. After 2000, when the political power changed in Romania the rhythm of changes in higher education slowed down rapidly. Although no formal declaration has been made as far as the continuation of the reform is concerned, there was no abrogation of existing legislation and no radical switch in the provision of the new regulations as was the case in Bulgaria, for instance.

One significant change that occurred in public higher education, once academic and financial autonomy was granted, was the introduction of study places with tuition fees in 1997. Table 4 presents the evolution of the number of tuition fee paying students in public higher education. The number of tuition fee paying students increased 33 times in the period from 1997 to 2001, due to a change in legislation which removed restrictions on the number of fee paying places. This shows that tuition fees have started to become an important source of financing for state higher education too. Interesting is that, while the number of places in private higher education institutions has to be approved by the Ministry of Education and Research (MER) so that they do not enroll more students than their basic material capacity allows, public higher education institutions do not need approval from the MER for the number of tuition fee paying students. However, there is a recommendation of the MER that the number of tuition fee paying students should not exceed the number of students financed by state.

We can conclude that higher education in Romania has undergone numerous changes in the period from 1990 to 2002. Among them are the significant expansion of the entire higher education system; the rise of the private higher education as an important actor in higher education in Romania but seen as a provider of low quality education; the change in the distribution of students among the disciplines with an inclination towards social and economic specializations and the initiation of higher education reform.

Given the controversial issue of private higher education that is seen as a provider of educational services of lower quality, the empirical research presented in this paper intended to analyse the opinions of the business community as one of the main beneficiaries of both public and private higher education graduates.

Doubtlessly, the general popular belief in Romania is that private higher education is of lower quality than state higher education. The objective of the study was to find out to what extent this popular belief is transferred to the business community and to employers who absorb the supply of highly educated (private or state) work force?

An empirical research based on a survey of companies was conducted from September to December 2000 in Bucharest. A sample of private companies with more than 50 employees from Bucharest was included in the survey. It was a convenience sample as the companies were accessed through operators who had acquintances within the companies. 195 companies were approached of which 113 agreed to participate in the survey representing a 58% response rate and 6.8% of the total number of companies in Bucharest with more than 50 employees.

The survey was conducted through personal interviews with Human Resource Managers, General Managers or other persons in charge of human resource activities in the companies. A questionnaire was completed together with an operator by each respondent.

Most participating companies (70%) have experience with private university graduates while 30% declared that they had never employed a private university graduate. Therefore, most companies were able - based on their own experience - to appreciate and to compare the work of state university graduates with that of private university graduates.

Even though the results of this approach have their limits they are still valuable, first of all because it is the first study that tried to find answers to these issues in Romania, and second it has a certain degree of generalisability given the fact that 50% of the private enrolments are in Bucharest and that 30% of the GDP is obtained in Bucharest.

All companies participating in the study declared that they apply the same human resource policies and practices for state university graduates and for private university graduates. However, when managers from companies were asked about the strengths and weaknesses of both state and private higher education systems and the strengths and weaknesses of state and private university graduates their answers revealed significant differences in their opinions about the two institutional types and their graduates. The respondents’ characterisations were convergent in the sense that even though the questions were open ended, similar responses were given for a number of features by a large percentage of the respondents.

4.1 The strenths and weaknesses of public and private higher education institutions

There were a number of features that stand out for state higher education and some other features that stand out for private higher education. Tables 5 and 6 present the first ten strengths (Table 5) and weaknesses (Table 6) named for both educational institutions by the respondents. State higher education was featured as offering good theoretical knowledge (main strength) but as lacking practical knowledge and practical orientation (main weakness).

The weakness of the state higher education named most often (40%) is that it does not offer sufficient opportunities to apply in practice the concepts that have been learned. They are 90% theoretical and do not emphasise the practical side sufficiently (see Table 6). Some even said: “It has no connection with the real world, with the practice.” It is in essence a system that teaches knowledge but no skills, which is what companies would really like graduates and future employees to have. This negative aspect is re-enforced by the fact that state higher education is perceived as not taking into account the market demands by 21.5% of the respondents.

The lack of financial resources and the low remuneration of the professors is reflected negatively in the state educational process and leads to the phenomenon of loosing the well prepared professors who go to private universities where they are better remunerated (especially senior professors who are close to retirement and wish to have a higher salary in their last years of activity so that they will receive a higher pension).

The high degree of heterogeneity of the private higher institutions lead to contradictory opinions about the material base of private higher education institutions (30.4% considered the material base as the main strength while 25.6% considered it a weakness). At the beginning of the 1990’s, when they were all set up they had a precarious material base but today there are some private universities with very good modern facilities and some that still have the same weak material base as before.

Private higher education is seen as taking market demand into consideration to a higher extent than state higher education by adapting through the diversification of the programmes and of the subjects taught, thus being being flexible and adaptable to market needs (25.6%).

The weak education offered by private universities (17%) is seen as insufficient knowledge, a reduced assimilation of the offered knowledge, a reverse proportional dimension of the quality-price relationship. The superficiality of the educational act (15.7%) is seen as lack of seriousness, low attendance of students to classes, permissive examinations. The easy access to private universities associated with easily getting through the process of studying still maintains the image of a low quality education putting the state universities in a favourable position from both points of view.

There were a few aspects indicated as weaknesses of both educational systems: lack of sufficient practice and practical skills, inadequate teaching methods, weak correlation with market demands, bad management and organization.

If we look at both Tables (5 and 6) and synthesize the main contrasts between state and private higher education institutions as seen by the business community these are:

- offering insufficient practical skills/developing practically oriented minds (to a certain extent).

The main strengths of state higher education are the main weaknesses of private higher education (rigorous admission process, seriousness in the educational act, good education, positive image) and the weaknesses of state higher education are the strengths of private higher education (material base, flexibility and more practical experience). State higher education institutions have tradition and stability but the dark side of this is translated in rigidity, while private higher education institutions have flexibility but the dark side of this is superficiality. Superficiality is seen as easy access (therefore attracting adequate candidates), as an easy way of studying (classes are very large with 100-300 students/course, professors do not attend classes, they are too permissive at examinations). One explanation can be the fact that private higher education institutions financed mainly from tuition fees need to enroll a large number of students and are therefore less selective. Secondly, the accreditation process requires certain percentages of students to pass their examinations and university management and professors are motivated to be more permissive because if the university shuts down they loose their job and source of income.

While state education has a positive image (tradition) that works in its favour, the private education has still a negative image (bad reputation) that works against it. It is as a vicious circle: state universities have good results (based on good educational acts), generate a positive image and consequently attract well prepared candidates who will have good results in the educational process and in the labor market later on. Private universities have bad results, generate a negative image on the market and this attracts weakly prepared candidates who will later have lower results of performance in examinations and in the labour market, thus promoting a low image of private higher education.

However, recently private higher education is improving its image mainly through its modern material base and through its higher flexibility in adapting to the market requests. Private universities offer different specialisations, interdisciplinary programmes that are more various than the state programmes and are welcomed by the public and the business community. At the same time public higher education is seen as declining in quality in spite of its traditional image.

When talking about the strengths and weaknesses of graduates, the answers of the respondents were consistent to their previous answers about higher education institutions. The combination good knowledge/lack of practical skills was kept for state university graduates. The contrast good knowledge of state university graduates and weak knowledge of private university graduates was also kept, while the issue of practical skills was somehow different this time. See Tables 7 and 8.

State university graduates’ main weakness (48% of the respondents), is perceived to be the lack of practical experience and practical knowledge which will make their integration into the work place lengthy and difficult from the perspective of the companies who like graduates to be able to do the specific job shortly after having been hired. Private university graduates were perceived also as lacking practical skills but some respondents (6.5%) characterised them as having a good practical spirit, a feature that did not appear for state graduates at all. An explanation can be the fact that a large percentage of the private university students are mature working people who already have practical experience.

Another contrast kept was the seriousness of the state university graduates who take their jobs seriously and do their jobs thoroughly, as compared to the superficiality of private university graduatesdescribed as lacking rigorousness when doing their jobs, not being punctual and not taking their jobs serious.

Some respondents even made a comparison between the two types of university graduates, by trying to emphasise the differences between them:

“State university graduates are efficient, they have a high degree of self-confidence, but they are less flexible, while private university graduates are receptive, adaptable and have a practical spirit, but they need better theoretical and conceptual knowledge.” (This respondent graduated first from a state university and then from a private university and was able to make the comparison from his own personal experience.)

“State university graduates have specialized knowledge, have good foreign languages and computing knowledge, but they lack practical and managerial experience, while private university graduates are strongly motivated, they have better experience in relating domains and are more aggressive with the clients (in a positive sense), but they have a weak professional training and are superficial.”

Table 8: The ten main weaknesses of state and private university graduates

Generally, state university graduates can be characterised as having good knowledge and being serious and thorough in doing their job but with the main weakness of lacking practical experience. At the same time, private university graduates are characterised as being more flexible, adaptable, with a higher degree of initiative and practical spirit, features seen as assets. But the same time weak points are mentioned: they know how to get around things (adaptable, flexible, with practical spirit) by pretending that they do things but without doing them in an appropriate way, by paying off to obtain things instead of doing what is supposed to be done (confirming superficiality).

(1) There is a gap between the demand for highly qualified labour force and the supply of it coming from higher education institutions. In quantitative terms the supply of work force is higher than the demand, but in qualitative terms the supply of well trained, well prepared and highly qualified work force is lower than the demand. In other words, higher education does not produce graduates with the skills and abilities at the level expected by the business community. The gap becomes larger as the society and business practices change in a fast rhythm together with the transition towards a market economy, while education has limited resources and weak initiative and consequently less flexibility to adapt to the new changes.

(2) Neither state nor private higher education satisfies entirely the demands of the business community as one of its main stakeholders, mainly because higher education is not sufficiently practically oriented. It is common to hear that there is a discrepancy between competencies acquired in education and those required in the ‘real life’. In Austria a similar study revealed that graduates lacked competencies like leading others, creative thinking, problem solving and communication skills (Kellerman and Sagmeister, 2000), similar to a great extent to the findings of the study conducted in Romania. The ideal higher education system in Romania would have the strengths of both institutional types, state and private, and would be more practically oriented.

(3) Companies’ policies and practices towards graduates from private higher education do not differ from those towards state university graduates but perceptions of the two categories of graduates are completely different. Higher education is seen as a condition for being hired by a company because “it offers a more structured way of thinking” but it is far from offering the skills and abilities required by companies. In the case of Romania this confirms that higher education degrees are still a kind of insurance policy, minimizing the likelihood of unemployment as in other countries such as Finland (Kivinen, Nurmi and Salminitty, 2000). Individual skills, abilities, qualities and experience are still determining the performance of graduates at the work place regardless of the university he/she graduated from.

(4) Private higher education in Romania cannot be considered a full success or a full failure as it has both distinctive strengths but also distinctive weaknesses. The future of private higher education is unpredictable because legislation allowed state higher education institutions to introduce a large number of places in tuition fee paying programmes, thus competing directly with private higher education institutions. State higher education institutions have two main advantages in this competition: the first and most importantis that they offer recognized diplomas and the second is that fees are usually more competitive at state higher education institutions than at private higher education institutions.

(5) More recently, in the context of the present reform in Romanian higher education the state higher education system is given more freedom as compared to the past, while private higher education is more restricted (academic quality standards, limitations on the number of places, requirements for the use of funds) in the name of quality assurance. The issues arising are as follows: Is the private higher education sector getting closer to the state higher education sector by improving quality or is the state higher education sector getting closer to the private sector? Now that state universities have larger financial autonomy and the right to enroll fee-paying students, is the economic argument going to be stronger than the quality argument as in most private universities or not?

Given the requirements of transition towards a market economy (marketisation, restructuring) and the way the employers characterised both institutional types (state and private) in Romania and their graduates, it can be appreciated that higher education in Romania makes a positive contribution to the transition process, but at the same time it does not fulfill sufficiently the needs of the business community, one main contributor to the transition process. Transition towards the market economy requires from university graduates both general skills as well as technical and specific skills. This corresponds to employers’ requirements in other countries.

In the U.K., for instance, employers want adaptive recruits, people who can rapidly fit into the workplace culture, work in teams, exibit interpersonal skills, communicate well, take on responsibility, perform efficiently and effectively, they want adaptable people, people who can use their abilities and skills to make the organisation evolve through bright ideas and persuading colleagues to adopt new approaches and they want transformative employees, people who can anticipate and lead change, who have higher level skills, such as analysis, critique, synthesis, etc (Woodley and Brennan, 2000). Similarly, other studies showed that employers generally look for the following in graduates: knowledge – general and business related -, technical know-how in the field of communication, personal skills, flexibility and ambition in France (Paul and Murdoch, 2000); specialised competence, methodological competence, social competence and participatory competence in Spain (Mora, Garcia-Montalvo and Garcia-Aracil, 2000); and work attitudes, knowledge, social skills and instrumental skills in Netherlands (Allen, Boezerooy, de Weert and van der Velden, 2000).

Graduates in Romania not only have to comply with and integrate into the existing market-oriented systems at company level (in the case of international companies) but they also have to create such systems in many fields and companies in Romania (the case of Romanian companies). Romanian higher education needs to be reformed itself before being able to provide both technical skills (knowledge and practice) and generic skills (seriousness, initiative, adaptability, communication, team spirit) to its students and graduates.

Allen J. , Boezerooy P., de Weert E. & van der Velden R. (2000) Higher Education and Graduate Employment in the Netherlands, European Journal of Education 35/2, pp. 211-219.

Arnesen, C. (2000) Higher Education and Graduate Employment in Norway, European Journal of Education 35/2, pp. 221-228

Damian R. (2002) Speech at the workshop of the Phare-ACE project “"Should free entry of universities be liberalised? Estimating the value of public and private higher education in Central and Eastern Europe" held in Bucharest, 20 April 2002.

Kellerman P. & Sagmeister G. (2000) Higher Education and Graduate Employment in Austria, European Journal of Education 35/2, pp. 157-164.

Kivinen O., Nurmi J. & Salminitty R. (2000) Higher Education and Graduate Employment in Finland, European Journal of Education, 35/2, pp. 164-177.

Korka, M. (2000) Strategy and Action in the Education Reform in Romania, Editura Paideia, Bucharest.

Marga, A. (2000) Education in Transition, Programul PHARE Universitas, Editura Paideia, Bucharest.

Ministry of National Education (1998) Higher Education in a Learning Society: Guidelines of the New Policy for Development of Higher Education in Romania, Bucharest.

Ministry of Education and Research (2002) Report of the National Commission of Academic Evaluation and Accreditation.

Mora J.G., Garcia-Montalvo J. & Garcia-Aracil A. (2000) Higher Education and Graduate Employment in Spain, European Journal of Education 35/2, pp. 229-237.

Moscati R. and Rostan M. (2000) Higher education and Graduate Employment in Italy, European Journal of Education 35/2, pp. 201-209.

National Commission of Statistics (2000), Statistical Yearbook of Romania, Bucharest.

Nicolescu, L. (2001) “The contribution of the education to the transition towards the market economy: Romanian case” in ed. Kari Liutho, Ten Years of Economic Transformation, Studies in Industrial and Engineering and Management, volume III Societies and Institutions in Transition, 2001, pp. 253-280.

Nicolescu (2002) “Reforming Higher Education in Romania”, European Journal of Education, March 2002, pp. 91-101.

Novak, C., Jigau M., Brancoveanu R., Iosifescu, S and Badescu M. (1998), Cartea Alba a Reformei Invatamantului in Romania (The White Book of the Education Reform in Romania), Ministry of Education, Bucharest.

Paul J.J. and Murdoch J. (2000) Higher Education and Graduate Employment in France, European Journal of Education 35/2, pp. 179-187.

Sapatoru, D. (2001) Higher Education Choices in Romania: Public or Private?, Ph.D. Thesis, Stanford University, School of Education, Stanford.

Saunders M. & Machell J (2000) Understanding emerging trends in higher education curricula and work

Schomburg H. (2000) Higher Education and Graduate Employment in Germany, European Journal of Education 35/2, pp. 189-200.

Teichler U. (2000) Graduate Employment and Work in Selected European Countries, European Journal of Education, 35/2, pp. 141-156.

Woodley A & Brennan J. (2000) Higher Education and Graduate Employment in the United Kingdom,

[1] The research was conducted with financial support of the Open Society Institute, Budapest, Hungary.

[2] There is a lack of concordance between the data published by the National Commission of Statistics and the data published more recently by the MER. Asked about this issue at a workshop held on 20 April 2002, one of the State Secretaries of the MER, explained the situation as having two causes: a) there was no thorough and precise counting of the private higher education institutions prior to 1999 and they ended up being more than thought when they were re-counted and b) there is a lack of communication between the MER and the National Commission of Statistics that resulted in figures not being up-dated and co-ordinated.

[3] The shift towards a market oriented economy required more economic thinking within the companies as compared to the prior period of central planning.

[4] There was a shortage of these qualifications at the beginning of 1990.

FIELDS OF EDUCATION	1989-1990	1994-1995	1997-1998

Public high. education (%) Technical Agriculture Economics Law Medicine Humanities Arts Total public high. education	64.92 3.88 9.42 1.44 10.15 9.62 0.57 100.00	39.52 0.00 18.70 6.04 10.31 23.49 1.93 100.00	34.56 4.30 18.50 4.29 11.42 24.59 2.33 100.00

Private high. education (%) Technical Agriculture Economics Law Medicine Humanities Arts Total private high. education	0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00	0.08 0.00 37.65 36.39 7.33 17.85 0.69 100.00	0.28 1.29 36.71 38.58 3.01 18.90 1.22 100.00

YEARS	1997-1998	1998-1999	1999-2000	2000-2001

Number of students	2292	14131	37709	77050

	STRENGTHS OF STATE INSTITUTIONS	NO.	%		STRENGTHS OF PRIVATE INSTITUTIONS	NO.	%

	TOTAL respondents	97	100		TOTAL respondents	82	100

1.	Good theoretical knowledge	32	32.9	1.	Good material base	25	30.4
2.	Good professors	25	25.7	2.	Flexibility, adaptability	20	25.6
3.	Seriousness in the educational act	23	23.7	3.	Professors are better stimulated financially	10	12.1
4.	Tough admission process	18	18.5	4.	Good professors (coming from state universities)	9	10.8
5.	Good image, tradition	13	13.4	5.	Financial resources for development	8	9.7
6.	Good material base	12	12.3	6.	Diversity of programmes and subjects	5	6
7.	Gratuity	9	9.2	7.	Better connected with practice	5	6
8.	Diplomas recognized by the Ministry of Education	8	8.2	8.	Access to information, co-operation with foreign universities	4	4.8
9.	Attracts well prepared high school graduates	6	6.1	9.	Good theoretical knowledge	3	3.6
10.	Offers facilities: scholarships, housing	5	5.1	10.	The tuition fees stimulate students to study	3	3.6

	WEAKNESSES OF STATE INSTITUTIONS	No.	%		WEAKNESSES OF PRIVATE INSTITUTIONS	No.	%

	TOTAL respondents	97	100		TOTAL respondents	82	100

1.	Lack of practical skills	39	40.2	1.	Lack of exigency in admission	27	32.9
2.	Inadequate material base	27	27.8	2.	Inadequate material base	21	25.6
3.	Does not take market demand into consideration	19	19.5	3.	Weak theoretical knowledge, weak education	14	17
4.	Does not create specialists	11	11.3	4.	Superficiality in the educational process	11	15.7
5.	Lack of financial resources	10	10.3	5.	No practical skills	12	14.6
6.	Outdated teaching methods	8	8.2	6.	High tuition fees	9	10.9
7.	Bad morale of the professors	7	7.2	7.	Lack of own professorial body –inadequate professors	7	8.5
8.	Unprepared professors	6	6.1	8.	It’s interested more in the turnover than in ensuring a good quality education	6	7.3
9.	Bad housing and catering services	6	6.1	9.	No/weak recognition from the Ministry of Education/labor market	6	7.3
10.	Decreasing exigency in admission and in the process	6	6.1	10.	Disinterest of students and professors	5	6

	STATE UNIVERSITY GRADUATES- WEAKNESSES	No.	%		PRIVATE UNIVERSITY GRADUATES - WEAKNESSES	No.	%
	TOTAL respondents	99	100		TOTAL respondents	62	100
1.	Lack of practical experience	48	48	1.	Weak knowledge	22	35
2.	Lack of initiative	8	8	2.	Lack of practical experience	22	35
3.	Do not adapt to team work	6	6	3.	Superficiality, lack of seriousness	7	11.2
4.	Out-dated knowledge	6	6	4.	Do not adapt to team work	4	6.5
5.	Lack of communication	5	5	5.	Loyalty, fidelity	3	4.8
6.	Adaptability	5	5	6.	Lack of initiative	3	4.8
7.	Low involvement	4	4	7.	Lack of communication	2	3.2
8.	Value personal interests more than company interests	4	4	8.	Expectations too high	1	1.6
9.	Impatience, wish to be promoted too fast	3	3	9.	They want only financial advantages	1	1.6
10.	Capacity to make decisions rapidly	3	3	10.	Low competence	1	1.6

Higher Education In Romania

Evolution And Views From The Business Community[1]

Lecturer Ph.D. Luminita Nicolescu

Good material base

Table 8: The ten main weaknesses of state and private university graduates

	STATE UNIVERSITY GRADUATES: STRENGTHS	No.	%		PRIVATE UNIVERSITY GRADUATES : STRENGTHS	No.	%

	TOTAL respondents	99	100		TOTAL respondents	62	100

1.	Good theoret. knowledge	58	58	1.	Good theoretical knowledge	11	19
2.	Seriousness, conscientiousness	20	20	2.	Openness to new things	9	14.5
3.	Openness to new things	15	15	3.	Desire for self-improvement	8	12.9
4.	Adaptability, flexibility	15	15	4.	Adaptability, receptivity	7	11.9
5.	Foreign languages	12	12	5.	Foreign languages	5	8
6.	Computing	12	12	6.	Computing	5	8
7.	Competence, efficiency	9	9	7.	Good practical spirit	4	6.5
8.	Motivation in profession	9	9	8.	Team spirit	4	6.5
9.	Team spirit	9	9	9.	Enthusiasm	4	6.5
10.	Professionals	8	8	10.	Seriousness	4	6.5