Between the Market and Solidarity: Commercializing Development Aid and International Higher Education in Socialist Yugoslavia

Abstract

This article examines how self-managed faculties in socialist Yugoslavia adopted market mechanisms in the 1970s and 1980s to attract international students and thus contributed to a commercialization of higher education. In the 1950s, Yugoslavia became a destination for students from postcolonial states because of its nonaligned politics. While Yugoslav officials first emphasized aid to students through scholarships, this article argues that projects based on profit seeking began to dominate thinking about aid in the late 1960s. Using archival records in Croatia and Serbia as well as UNESCO and World Bank reports, this article shows how domestic and international factors influenced these changes. Domestically, decentralizing political reforms and decreased funding for higher education allowed republic policy makers to disconnect technical aid from political priorities and to pursue self-financing international students. Detached from centralized policy making, Yugoslav university and republic leaderships, primarily in SR Croatia and SR Serbia, chose the immediate profits of international students over long-term investments in scholarship students. Internationally, reforms promoted by UNESCO and the World Bank shifted aid away from university training abroad to vocational training in situ. These new policies complemented an emerging international division of labor suited more to the economic interests of OECD states and multinational corporations than developing states.

Textual Analysis of Quality Assurance Development in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Higher Education Sector

“…The historical structure of Bosnia and Herzegovina's higher academic system dates back to the former country of Yugoslavia, wherein four distinct stages can be singled out: first, between 1945 and 1954, a period of socio-ideological and instructional transformation of higher education, with an emphasis on state building (Ivic, 1992;Uvalic-Trumbic, 1990). Second, between 1954 and 1982, a period of inner higher education transformation and development centralized around a close compliance with Marxist ideology was formally instituted (Ivic, 1992;Nellie, 1980;Wright, 2021). Third, from 1982 to 1989, a brief period of logical and reasonable qualitative higher education reform was introduced with an emphasis on economic progress (Samolovcev, 1989).…”

Provosts’ Quality Assurance Strategies and Lecturers’ Job Performance in Colleges of Education in Kwara State, Nigeria

“…All human agencies, especially those engaged in human capital development like colleges of education, need quality assurance because quality assurance is the process of ensuring that the learners are maximally imparted with the skills and knowledge as stated in national educational goals and objectives (Bubou & Job, 2022;Okeke-James et al, 2020). The concern for quality enhancement in education service delivery necessitated the relinquishment of quality assurance in education as a rising policy perspective in the contemporary world, which radiated from the World Conference on Education for All initiated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (de Bruin, 2019;Wright, 2021). Representatives of the international community agreed that all countries should pay greater attention to improving all aspects of education (quality) and ensuring excellence in all situations, as observed in (Nwite & Nkiru, 2017).…”