Romania is destroying its education system and its future together with it

“You don’t need bombs if you want to destroy a nation, it’s enough to destroy its education”. This was a statement from Daniel David in 2021, at the time head of Babes Bolyai University in Cluj, the highest rated university in Romania. Although not originally his, it is a powerful declaration – you would think the speaker is a convinced protector of the public education system.

Just 4 years later, the same Daniel David is the minister of Education and currently spearheading the harshest austerity measures in education since the 2008 financial crisis. Romania already had an underfinanced education system with disastrous results. Now, with huge emigration rates, a low skilled workforce and an aging population, these measures could well be the last nail in the coffin for Romania’s future.

Going from last to worse

If you look on Eurostat and search for the public expenditure on education for the last 12 years, you would see countries changing positions each year, depending on their budgets. Only one country keeps the same place each year: Romania. Dead last in the EU, it is the country that has spent the least of its GDP on education in the entire union. The same goes for public expenditure in Research and Development. 

What are the consequences for this lack of funding or interest for education? The numbers speak for themselves. Romania has the lowest percentage of graduates of tertiary education (e.i. College degrees) for those aged between 25 and 34 (23% Romania vs. 44% EU average). Looking at PISA tests on 15 year olds, Romania also scores dead last in the EU in each proficiency: mathematics, reading and science.  

Romania does however take first place in a few areas. For example, 16% of Romanian children leave school early – almost double the 9% EU average. Also, the country has the highest number of NEETs – that is, those aged between 15 and 29 years old that are neither in employment nor in education or training. Specifically, 19% of Romania’s youngsters find themselves outside education and work. It’s not just about bad rankings. It’s the story of how the Romanian state abandoned several generations of children.

“Theoretically it’s stupid…”

The Romanian educational system was not doing great whichever way you look at it, but with the recent austerity measures, it can only go downhill. Scholarships were cut and different schools in the rural areas – deemed too small to exist – would have to be integrated into bigger schools from neighbouring villages. 500 schools have since lost their legal personality, making it much easier for local authorities to dissolve them. 

The Education minister also ignored or publicly lied about different sets of data. For example, to justify making teachers work longer hours, Daniel David said that Romanian teachers work a lot less than their peers in other European countries. Which was later proven to be false. The same minister also censored a report elaborated by the Institute of Education Sciences. From the report’s 23 pages, which mostly contradicted the government’s position, Daniel David reduced it to only 2 pages. 

“Theoretically it’s stupid […] but we’ll have to take the money for the military industry from the Education and Health sectors”, stated president Nicusor Dan.  But all these cuts that are supposed to reduce the public deficit have amounted in the end to only saving 0,02% of GDP. Despite not doing anything to resolve the state’s deficit, it will surely impact those affected by the austerity. For comparison, one military acquisition alone this year – a 2 billion euros contract with Israel –  was 25 times bigger than all these cuts. 

If the president believes this to be “theoretically stupid”, then how would it turn out to be smart in practice? 

A state that works solely for the middle class

The decline of public education is not only due to the state’s lack of interest – it is more than passivity. It is the lobby of two different groups. 

One is the private schools sector, a growing business in Romania. While still small, their lobbyists often occupy key roles in the ministry of Education and have the ears of most political parties. They have also managed to change national laws that would lower standards and relax conditions for private schools to function and get government funding. Yes, private schools in Romania are subsidised by the state, while the government is slashing funds for public schools.

The other one is the elite public schools and institutions. National Colleges, for example, are glorified high schools that obtain this status only if their students achieve high results in national exams for a few years in a row. Their main interest is the prestige and privileges that come together with their status. For example, in 2022 National Colleges lobbied for each of them to have their own special admission exam, different from the rest of the high schools. This measure would have incentivized students to take on private tuition and thus strongly favored students from upper middle class families. They’ve achieved their goals only partially, but time is on their side. 

What both these groups share is their elitist vision towards education. All that matters is the interest of the middle and upper middle class. The rich can always send their children to prestigious private schools, while the poor can just be told to study harder. And if not, “Oh, well, there’s always a need for somebody to clean toilets, right?”. 

Middle class families – while they or their parents only managed to climb up the social ladder due to free access to a public education system – have now developed an elitist and selfish vision of society. They support that the state should exempt them from taxes, cut funds destined for the “poor and lazy”, but also subsidise their needs and lifestyle. Neoliberalism for the poor, socialism for us. 

Let’s take the capital Bucharest, as an example. Normally, children are assigned to the school closest to them. But some schools are better than others – so much so, that some middle schools are seen as elite schools. In order to get their children in, many parents go to someone living in the school’s vicinity and pay that person to declare them as tenants in the same apartment.

They never actually live there – it would be impossible, some apartments have registered tens or hundreds of tenants that are supposed to live under the same roof. But if that is what the papers say, then the school is obliged by law to take the children in. Although this practice is illegal, it is also out in the open. Offers are advertised on the internet and street posters while authorities do nothing about it. 

Another oddity in the educational system is that it is very generous when it comes to monetary compensation for students with excellent results in school. But when it comes to helping students from struggling families, suddenly the state has no money left. 

Unsurprisingly, overachievers predominantly come from families that are well-0ff. Students that do bad in school or abandon it altogether come from low income families. Of course, the state can and should do both. But the fact that the state prioritizes the ones that are already well off over those suffering from poverty showcases whose interest it serves and why. The rich and the middle class have the resources – monetary, organisational – to promote their interests. The poor and the working class do not. That is why the state is now modelling the educational system not for the needs of the many, but for the needs of a privileged minority.

The dim future ahead

On the national TV post, a teacher said in a live interview that maybe the government should also consider importing 100,000 South Asians to work as teachers. The suggestion was, of course, sarcastic. It was a critique of how the government sees education as just another service that has to be provided, ideally with the lowest cost possible. However, that didn’t stop one news outlet, named “Private Education”, to take it seriously and put it as a serious title. 

The statement also shows how national elites manage growing existential problems. The number of Asian Workers has grown exponentially in the last 10 years and will probably continue to do so. It is not so much because of Romania’s economic results, but because of the country’s huge emigration rates. Millions of Romanians have gone abroad for work and many of them will probably not come back. Demographics are another important factor, as the country’s population will decrease by 3 million, mostly from natural reasons. 

Thus, in the following 25 years, the country will see its workforce shrink rapidly, its median age rise and its share of pensioners increase. Combined with a collapsing public educational system, this is a perfect recipe for a country to miss out on economic growth and development. The so-called solution coming from politicians and business sectors until now was to hire migrants for less developed countries. They are mostly hired into low skilled labours, with lower wages and, thus a higher profit for the employer. Migrant workers also have fewer rights, suffer numerous abuses and are brought into what resembles the infamous Kafala system in the Golf States. 

Instead of addressing structural problems in the long term, Romanian governments chose to satisfy the private sector’s quest for short term profits. It has done this when it came to public transport, the health sector, and now education. It cannot be more clear that present political elites today only serve business interests. They’re not even pretending anymore: president Nicusor Dan blatantly asked the business sector to write the laws themselves. 

Of course Romania is not the first country where political elites turn to serving the interests of the business elites, instead of siding with the people. But you seldom see such short-sightedness and ignorance of long term consequences. By destroying the little that’s left of Romania’s public education system – together with all public sectors for that matter – political elites are steering the ship off a cliff. With a shrinking and aging population, and a low skilled workforce, what other direction can a country take, other than down? When we will realize the effects of political elites selling off the country’s future, it will already be too late.

Photo: Photo: Daniel David, Romanian minister of Education (source: The Ministry of Education and Research (Romania)

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