THE NUMBER of Slovak students leaving to the Czech Republic to pursue higher education has risen steeply in the past 10 years. An estimated 6.4 percent of students studying at Czech universities in 2013 were Slovak, nearly double the number from 2003, when it was 3.5 percent, according to the annual Academic Ranking and Rating Agency (ARRA) report.
The situation is unlikely to change significantly any time soon and “the impact of this effect can be especially dramatic for Slovakia and its economy,” Ivan Ostrovský of ARRA said, as quoted by the SITA newswire.
Since this was the tenth edition of the report, ARRA decided not only to publish the ranking of individual faculties based on their performance last, but it also analysed changes over the past decade, pointing to the developments in the university education sector.
Another problem highlighted in the report is that the number of university students in Slovakia is falling. Moreover, the number of applications is falling too. While in 2006 there were 84,500 young people applying for studies at Slovak faculties, last year it dropped to 54,500. Just 41,600 students eventually enrolled. Back in 2006 it was nearly 60,000, Ostrovský said, as reported by SITA.
The planned capacity at schools is 62,000, which means that the 33 percent of university potential is still unused.
“On one hand, we ineffectively waste even the small amount of public resources which the universities receive,” Ostrovský said. “On the other hand these are funds the state could use to improve the quality of the schools.”
ARRA ranked together 112 faculties of which 104 were public and eight private. The agency divided them into 11 groups based on their specialisation. The report also showed that students are most interested in the Jessenius Medical Faculty of the Comenius University (UK) situated in Martin. The list of long-time leaders at top positions includes the Faculty of Economics of the Technical University in Košice (TUKE), Faculty of Pedagogy of the University of Trnava, and the UK’s Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences, SITA wrote.
