As part of the higher education reforms announced last year by the Romanian government, the European University Association’s Institutional Evaluation Programme (IEP) will carry out evaluations of 90 universities in Romania over the course of the next three years.In September 2011, as foreseen in the Romanian Higher Education Bill, the higher education institutions (public and private) were grouped into three major categories: research intensive; teaching and research oriented; and mainly teaching institutions, in a move designed to diversify the country’s higher education system. The reforms also require the classification to be followed by an evaluation of all institutions carried out by an international agency.
EUA’s independent Institutional Evaluation Programme (IEP) was selected and has agreed to carry out this evaluation process as part of a project carried out with the Romanian Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding (UEFISCDI). This project will be officially launched today (9 January) by the Romanian Minister for Education at a meeting taking place in Bucharest.
Using the IEP guidelines, each institution will be evaluated by a team of international experts - including university leaders, as well as students, and higher education professionals – all from outside of Romania. The evaluations will focus on a broad range of issues such as institutional mission and how this relates to the classification exercise; supporting quality provision, quality assurance mechanisms and strategic management.
The IEP will first evaluate the 42 institutions in the first two groups of the classification. Following an institutional self-evaluation report and two site visits of the evaluation team, a final evaluation report on each evaluated university will be delivered and made publicly available. The remaining 48 institutions in the third group will then be evaluated – also by IEP – in the course of 2013 and 2014. For more information on the IEP Programme, please visit: www.eua.be/iep.
