DO WE CHANGE A LAW — OR CHANGE THE FUTURE?

By: Katerina Topalova

There are not many things in a country that can change the future while almost nobody notices.

There are no sirens, no emergency press conferences, no political spectacle. Just a text of dozens of pages, working groups, public debates, and terms that usually sound far too technical to spark broader public interest.

And then, a few years later, the consequences become deeply personal.

We see them in clinics, in schools, in courtrooms, in newsrooms, in institutions. We see them in the people the system creates.

That is why changes in higher education are rarely just an educational issue. They are a story about what kind of country we want to become.

The new higher education law, which is expected to be adopted, has already opened a debate that has long existed beneath the surface. Not only among professors and students, but also around a broader question: is it possible to modernize a system that has been criticized for years without losing its essence in the process?

The proposed solutions bring an ambitious framework — a new financing model, mechanisms for measuring quality, rankings, additional criteria, and new organizational models.

And once again, on paper, almost everything looks logical, because very few people would say they do not want better universities.

Very few would say they do not want better science, and even fewer would say they are satisfied with the conditions as they are today.

For years we have been hearing the same criticisms — that universities produce graduates who struggle to connect with the needs of the labor market, that young people are leaving, that scientific output is limited, that there is a gap between diplomas and practical knowledge.

But perhaps this is exactly where the debate becomes far more complicated, because education is one of the rare systems where everyone easily agrees there is a problem, yet finds it much harder to agree on the solution.

For example, if the problem is quality — how exactly do we measure quality? By the number of scientific papers? By citations? By international rankings? By the percentage of employed graduates? By student satisfaction? By critical thinking? By innovation?

The answer is not simple, because a university is not a factory.

In a factory, productivity can be measured relatively easily.

In education, results are often visible years later, sometimes even decades later.

A good professor cannot always be measured by a number, a good generation cannot always be displayed in a table, and a scientific contribution cannot always immediately be turned into statistics.

That is precisely why public debate has raised questions about the criteria for academic staff and the measurement of scientific contribution.

Some believe that without higher standards and clear criteria, better results can hardly be expected.

Others warn that turning education into a system of administrative metrics may create an entirely new problem — a race for numbers instead of substance.

And perhaps this is where the clash is not between two political positions, but between two different philosophies.

One believes systems change through accountability, standards, and measurable results.

The other warns that education must never be completely reduced to a formula.

Both have arguments. Both have logic.

But perhaps the most interesting thing is that, somewhere in this entire debate, the human being is sometimes lost.

The student. The young researcher. The teaching assistant. The professor.

Because no law begins to live inside a ministry.

It begins to live in the lecture hall, in the laboratory, in the library, in the conversation between a student and a professor, in the question of whether a young person sees a future here — or is already opening the website of a university abroad.

Perhaps that is the hardest part of the whole story.

No educational reform begins from zero. Every reform enters a system that already has its own habits, resistance, weaknesses, and expectations.

The history of education remembers many strategies and reforms. Many new beginnings.

And almost every one of them began with the hope that this would finally be the turning point.

Perhaps this time it truly will be. Perhaps the new law will become the necessary step toward better higher education.

Or perhaps the real question is not whether the law is good or bad, but whether we are prepared to do something far more difficult than passing a law.

To build trust in the system.

Because sometimes the greatest problem in education is not only quality, but the belief that knowledge truly matters. And that does not change through articles and clauses — it is built much more slowly.

And that is precisely why education has one inconvenient rule: by the time we discover whether we made the right decision, an entire generation will already have passed.

The text was developed within the project “Advocacy for Inclusive Development,” financially supported by the Government of Switzerland through the Civica Mobilitas programme.

The content of this text is the sole responsibility of the Forum for Reasonable Policies, IOHN and BIRC and in no way can be considered to reflect the views of the Government of Switzerland, Civica Mobilitas or the implementing organisations.