News analysis: Inefficiencies threaten Lithuania's higher education

A flawed higher education system has been the case in Lithuania for many years, but the recent data and a growing discontent with inefficiencies in higher education system among prominent education specialists, economists, students and the heads of the state, has reached a breaking point.

Dalia Grybauskaite, Lithuanian president, has recently prepared the amendments of the Law of Science and Studies, which are aimed at heightening a threshold for those applying to study at Lithuanian universities. Grybauskaite said the country needed properly educated people, not the higher number of diplomas.

"Today we have a situation, when the higher education is being devalued," said the president earlier this month after the meeting with the representatives of academic society, business and student organizations.

"We have to take care of the quality of the higher education immediately, otherwise in the future we will have an illiterate country with higher education," said Grybauskaite.

She proposes that only those students that were able to pass at least one maturity exam would be allowed to apply for state funded as well as paid studies.

TOO MANY UNIVERSITIES

There are 14.5 universities and colleges per million residents in Lithuania, a small Baltic country with population of less than 3 million, shows the most recent data from MOSTA, Lithuania's Research and Higher Education Monitoring and analysis Centre. The average amount in Europe is 4.6.

In 2014, meanwhile, the number of students at Lithuanian universities decreased by 14 percent, compared the number in 2012, colleges saw a decrease of 10 percent. At the same time the number of universities and colleges remained the same, and the number of study programs increased.

"It's time one started negotiations to merge universities," Algirdas Butkevicius, Lithuanian prime minister, said at an annual conference on higher education policy issues earlier this month.

"Let's follow the path that Scandinavian, Western European universities take decidedly consolidating their universities, to which, by the way, our students willingly apply to study at," said the head of the cabinet.

LACK OF SKILLS

Inefficiency in the higher education system has been reflected in the labor market with employers competing for every student with programming, engineering skills, while those with degrees in social sciences and humanities face risk of becoming unemployed.

About 11.9 percent graduates from the universities and around one fifth of graduates from colleges were still unemployed six months after graduation, showed the research from weekly magazine Veidas conducted a year ago.

Lithuanian government insists the country's higher education system has to be oriented towards developing skills in life sciences, technologies, engineering and mathematics.

According to various forecasts, next year Lithuania will face a shortage of around 13,000 specialists in the field of information technologies.

"Representatives of social sciences and humanities mostly work in other fields, which do not require their qualifications," said Butkevicius.

However, the situation has started to change somewhat. According to MOSTA, during the previous two years social sciences faced 20 percent decrease in the number of students, or the most, while humanities lost 10 percent students. Biomedicine has been the only field of studies that saw an increase in the number of students.

POOR SKILLS

Willingness to gain bachelors in business administration, law or economics among the youth that weren't doing their best while studying at school is being fully satisfied with the universities that try to improve their profitability and lower the threshold for those able to pay for their education.

Raimondas Kuodis, the economist and the deputy governor of the Bank of Lithuania, thinks crisis in neighboring Russia at the end of 90s had made a negative influence on Lithuania's higher education system.

"Universities' funding was rather poor after Russian crisis, they implemented a surviving strategy with everyone calling itself a university, expanding studies beyond the boundaries of state funding," Kuodis said in an interview to radio station Ziniu Radijas.

"And that's how the wave of extramural students and diplomas' trade has started," explained Kuodis noting that the current situation at Lithuanian higher education system is tragic.

Universities' money-oriented attitude and ignorance in regards to the quality of studies have really angered hardworking students as well.

Tomas Marcinkevicius, a PhD student from Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, says academic activities at Lithuanian universities are based on market principles rather than education.

"Education is being perceived as an item to generate income," Marcinkevicius said on Monday in an interview to Lithuanian National Radio LRT.

In 2015, Lithuania's ministry of education and science ordered universities to set a minimum threshold grade for those applying for the higher education. 5 universities and 7 colleges haven't implemented the requirement, while many others have set a minimal threshold of just 1 in universities and 0.8 in colleges, according to MOSTA.

According to the centre, such a low threshold cannot improve the quality of studies.

"Only 2 percent of students paying for their studies wouldn't be able to exceed the threshold of grade 1," said MOSTA in its report.

According to the President's Office, currently there are around 150,000 students at Lithuanian universities with around 46 percent of them being funded by the state. Almost half of them have a job that doesn't require the skills they've acquired at university.

IT'S NOT ABOUT MONEY

Deteriorating quality of studies in Lithuanian universities now has nothing to do with poor state funding, and is rather a problem of inefficient spending.

According to the latest MOSTA report, from 2004 to 2011 Lithuania's spending on higher education had grown from 1.1 percent to 1.5 percent of GDP, exceeding the EU average of 1.3 percent. From 2009 to 2013 the country universities' revenue had grown by 35 percent.

Lithuanian government is to invest around 436 million euros of the EU allocated funds in developing the Strategy of Smart Specialization. The strategy is based on investments in projects of new manufacturing processes, inclusive and creative society, energy, sustainable environment, ITC, biotechnologies etc.

Coupled with the funds from Lithuanian state budget total investments in Lithuania's higher education will amount to around 1.31 billion euros.

But the government's view on investments in higher education has received criticism. Nerijus Maciulis, the chief economist from Swedbank in Lithuania, says the country's program on academic research and development, innovations that speaks about restoring the premises and fixing the roofs is a clear sign that roofs are cracked at the ministry of education and science, and not at universities.

"This is an enormous amount of money which could help shaking Lithuanian education system up from the ground or even establishing it on a new foundation," Maciulis wrote in his commentary published in business news website vz.lt.

"Many indicators show that we've got a non-functional, inefficient, education system that is based on quantity, but not quality," wrote Maciulis.

In its latest report monitoring education and training in the EU, the European Commission urged Lithuania to adjust the skill pool to the needs of the labor market. The EC names the problem of divergence between the skills and the needs of the labor market as permanent. Endit