Ramiz Mehdiyev
The head of the Azerbaijani Presidential Administration, Ramiz Mehdiyev, has said that higher education is not up to scratch.
He was speaking at the close of a meeting yesterday of the president's education commission, which was attended by ministers and university rectors.
Ramiz Mehdiyev told the university rectors that although Azerbaijan was developing dynamically, it could not meet its need for skilled specialists. Admission examinations for state service and entry tests by other companies showed that graduates' knowledge was not up to standard.
He said that one major problem was a lack of young staff to establish European education standards in Azerbaijan.
Ramiz Mehdiyev said that although universities had announced that they were joining the Bologna Process to create common European standards in education, very few changes had been made to their curricula since the Soviet period. Most students could not demonstrate sufficient knowledge to meet standards of international test systems in English and computing.
He said that the number of dissertations was constantly increasing, but articles by academics working in Azerbaijan’s education system were rarely published in the world's leading academic journals.
New funding system
Earlier in the meeting of the education commission, Ramiz Mehdiyev outlined the procedure to implement President Ilham Aliyev's decree "On the application of a new funding mechanism in higher education" of 10 February 2010.
He told the meeting that, as instructed in the decree, the Finance Ministry, Economic Development Ministry and Education Ministry had studied the experience of other countries and prepared and submitted to the Cabinet of Ministers draft normative legal acts to introduce per capita funding in higher education in Azerbaijan. The Cabinet had drafted a decision based on these proposals. The draft decision specifies the funds to be allocated per student on bachelor's and master's degree courses.
Education Minister Misir Mardanov said that the new funding rules would be applied in 29 state-run universities and eight private universities from this year. He was sure that the new mechanism would produce positive results.
The chairwoman of the State Student Admissions Commission, Maleyka Abbaszade, said that the rules for student admissions this year had taken account of the new funding mechanism.
Finance Minister Samir Sharifov said that the new mechanism would help promote competition in education and allow the universities to become more autonomous. He said that the new system would apply only to the new intake of students.
University rectors welcomed the new funding mechanism and thought it would have a positive impact on the development of education.
APA
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