Politics of access to higher education and demographic changes in Central and Eastern Europe: What are the strategic options for the future?

Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries as well as their educational systems have undergone significant changes since the fall of state-socialist regimes. However, their common cultural, political and societal heritage has made their post-socialist development similarly path-dependent. Nowadays they are facing very similar challenges that are linked not only to EU context and Bologna process, but most importantly to the global context. One of these “critical junctures” is demographic structure and trends that have indisputable impact on the educational systems and in consequence on competitiveness of national economies and sustainability of societies in the region. CEE countries underwent rapid massification (M. Trow) since 1990s and at the same time significant demographic decline following the fall of communist regimes. The mutual dynamics of these two trends has brought major challenges for higher education access policies in recent years. Governments and higher education institutions had to find strategies both how to maintain rich university traditions of CEE countries and at the same time how to balance fluctuation between high demand and low supply in massification phase and low demand and high supply due to impact of demographic decline. After showing the CEE context in the higher education policy and demographic changes based on both qualitative and quantitative comparative approach I will follow by analysing the case of Czech Republic as a country with the most rapid expansion in 2000s and with restrictive access policy since 2010. I will analyse data on admission procedures from years 2004-2014 from the point of view of demand and supply of higher education. This approach has been surprisingly rarely applied in the study of higher education policies with some exception of US system where higher education institutions usually enjoy high autonomy and higher education market dynamics is very high. However, with growing importance of global competition and neoliberal reforms of higher education in many European countries, the supply/demand approach is becoming the promising policy framework for addressing the challenges of access and its interconnectedness with demographic changes. On the basis of these two analytical steps I will conclude with scenario analysis, methodologically grounded in future research (as applied eg. by G. Reger and D. Mietzer), identifying scenarios for future development of access policies in CEE countries. This analysis will take into consideration both trend-based techniques and key-factor based techniques to address both demographic changes and key policy rationales and trends. Following the OECD “University Futures” project, but considerably revising and adapting the results to present CEE context I will analyse four scenarios with regard to two axes – global/local and state/autonomy - as independent variables. These scenarios are designated as “European”, “world-class”, “regional” and “New Public Management” models and will show what are the strategic options for the future access policies in CEE.