Recent trends in Estonian higher education: Emergence of the binary division from the point of view of staff development

Conclusions

The academic standing of the staff working in vocational higher education must be judged as unsatisfactory according to two possible criteria: the traditional criteria, which are derived from the universities operating within the previous unitary higher education system; and the criteria outlined by the bill of the Law of Higher Education Institutions. The latter derive from the same historical institutional pattern.

There are many reasons to conclude that, academically, in most fields of study, the new institutions do not reach the level of the old ones. However, the mission of the new sector—the second-rank academic institutions in the eyes of the traditional academic community—is at least debatable, if not mistaken. The public university sector appears to be in deep crisis, with academics so attached to the Humboldtian university that they ignore the claims for social relevance in education.⁸ This is further complicated by deepening financial hardship.

Using traditional criteria, it is possible that Estonia will be left with two socially irrelevant higher education sectors, instead of one functioning sector. It is also possible that the second sector, which does not fit these criteria, will be eliminated. However, the fault does not lie wholly with the dominance of traditional university attitudes. It also lies in a lack of vision on the part of the new institutions. As children of the proletariat society, they fail to recognise their vocational orientation as a benefit, and instead try to hide it. They are developing theoretically overloaded four- to five-year study programmes. None of these institutions has solved the problem of balancing the requirement of employing 50 per cent faculty full time and maintaining a satisfactory academic level. The need to demonstrate that part-time employees may actually benefit the vocational sector has not yet been understood.⁹

As long as the sector continues to accept the rules forced upon it by the old universities, it probably has no useful role in Estonia. Its institutions, especially the public institutions, cannot compete with the traditional universities in academic fields. The universities, on the other hand, are beginning to understand that the policy they proclaimed some years ago, which was based on the clear distinction between two sectors on the German pattern, does not work in a small country with very limited resources, and an inheritance from the previous regime of a large university sector with an enrolment rate of more than 20 per cent of the age group. The universities have agreed to offer their own non-degree courses at diploma level, and now seriously threaten the small new institutions. From the financial point of view, the universities' expressed desire to swallow the small vocational institutions is beneficial since the small institutions have no clearly distinct role of their own.

The private vocational higher education institutions do not conceal the fact that, according to their own vision, they have little place in the vocational sector. Some of them would like an official status equal to that of the universities, the right to offer graduate and postgraduate courses as well as diploma courses, and the registration of their diplomas and certificates on an equal basis with the public universities in the Register of Diplomas and Certificates at the Ministry of Culture and Education. In other words, they are interested in becoming fully accredited universities. This increases competition for students and—given the Estonian mechanism of public financing of higher education based on the number of students admitted provided by the Ministry of Culture and Education¹⁰—there will be less money for public universities. Here lies the origin of the principle that the universities are established by parliament and the vocational higher education institutions by executive action by the government.

The existence of the new sector is seriously threatened. The current pattern of postgraduate studies has blocked the preparation of a sufficient number of research-degree holders, even at master's level.¹¹ The new institutions cannot train their own faculty. The recent experience of Concordia International University—which depends greatly on staff with bachelor's and master's degrees from the United States, who form some 80 per cent of the faculty—demonstrates that the participation of first- or even second-rank Western academics in Estonian higher education can never be very high. If the system cannot accept experienced local staff for legal appointments in the vocational sector, unless they have a research degree, these institutions will not survive for long. Society will be back to the position where there are a large number of underpaid or unemployed academics, but a shortage of qualified individuals who could be self-employed and capable of running small and medium-size enterprises.