Study Success at the Clash Point of Excellence and Social Dimension

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F03302032%3A_____%2F18%3AN0000003" target="_blank" >RIV/03302032:_____/18:N0000003 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-319-77407-7.pdf" target="_blank" >https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-319-77407-7.pdf</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Study Success at the Clash Point of Excellence and Social Dimension

Original language description

The chapter examines the tension between the search for excellence and the concern for equity, with a focus on four former socialist countries in Eastern Europe, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. The authors use study success, completion and dropout as a filter to assess the impact of national and institutional policies to foster excellence in research and teaching. The purpose of their research is to test whether excellence and inclusion can be promoted at the same time. Relying on information from the Europe-wide report on success (HEDOCEstudy), data from the OECD’s Education at a Glance and national reports for eachof the four countries reviewed in their article, Vlk and Stiburek review the range of national and institutional approaches used to promote success. In all four countries, the government introduced negative financial incentives to discourage students from taking too long to complete their studies. This meant, concretely, that they would have to pay fees if they exceeded a set time for finishing. Acting in a more proactive way, the Czech Republic has established social scholarships targeted for students with special needs. The beneficiaries appear to be more successful than the other students. Besides financial incentives, Poland and Hungary are providing students with detailed information on labour market outcomes to help them in their choice of academic programmes. Some universities have put in place counselling and support services for at-risk students. Looking in more depth at the Czech experience, the article finds out that, due to the high degree of institutional autonomy, the government’s ability to boost completion rates and reduce the number of dropouts is limited. The main instrument is the funding formula which takes graduation rates into account in the budget allocation to universities. The Ministry of Education also relies on institutional performance plans to boost social integration and improvements in academic success among at-risk students. At the same time, however, the priority given to excellence and increased research productivity appears to take the attention of university leaders away from teaching effectiveness and the need to decrease dropouts. Based on the results of their case studies, the authors conclude that striving for excellence may lead universities to neglect important aspects that are not at the heart of national policies or measured by international rankings, such as the quality of teaching and learning, student support, diversity and other key elements of the social dimension. To reverse this trend, they argue convincingly in favour of devoting additional resources to curriculum reform and innovative pedagogical initiatives to stimulate student engagement and recommend that QA evaluations take completion rates more systematically into consideration.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

C - Chapter in a specialist book

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

50601 - Political science

Project

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Continuities

N - Vyzkumna aktivita podporovana z neverejnych zdroju

Publication year

2018

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name

European Higher Education Area: The Impact of Past and Future Policies

ISBN

978-3-319-77407-7

Number of pages of the result

14

Pages from-to

189-202

Number of pages of the book

721

Publisher name

Springer International Publishing AG

Place of publication

Cham

UT code for WoS chapter

000466533300013