Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Who has the right to education in Moldova?

In the higly centralized educational system in Moldova, the Ministry of Education establishes the numbers of students that may enroll in higher education institutions. Particularly, this is a problem for students that want to pursue undegraduate studies in popular areas such as Law, Economics, etc, since the demand for educational services in these areas is greater than universitities are allowed to supply. This policy extends beyond the continuously decreasing number of state scholarships. Now, even students who are capable and willing to pay for an education, often find their freedom of choice limited by Government regulations. It is not clear why a high-school graduate who wants to study economics, is not allowed to. Is it because other, let's say 2,000, high-school graduates also want to study economics this year? Is it because the Government can only guarantee jobs to 2,000 to-be-economists 4-5 years from now? Obviously, none of these reasons is valid. In a democracy, people should be able to freely exercise their right to education, and freedom of choice. The Government should oversee and regulate the quality of educational services, as well as maintain affordable education for poor students, rather than interfere with the market-driven quantity and cost of services.

Comments:

Edward Lucas , July 30, 2006  

Hi lucia, Edward Lucas here

I took a couple of years out from covering this region and worked as education correspondent for the Economist. Guess what? The British higher education system is a planned economy, where the government determines the numbers of students. And as Brezhnev demonstrated all too well, in a planned economy you can try to dictate price and quantity, and the only variable is quality. Which collapses

regards
Edward