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Chapter 5 presents a brief summary of key issues. Returning to the conceptualisation of professional volunteers as knowledge intermediaries, it emphasises the critical learning opportunities associated with placements in low-resource settings. It then cautions against equating mobility metrics with notions of excellence per se, arguing that any experience must be judged on its outcomes if we are to preserve principles of equality of opportunity in National Health Service (NHS) careers. It then presents the Sustainable Volunteering Model as the basis for future evidence-based up-scaling that complies with highest ethical principles whilst respecting the duty of care to professional volunteers.

Romanian higher education has undergone a series of transformations in a short timespan (2009–2013), fuelled by a series of public debates and preparatory projects. The adoption of the most recent Law on Education (Law 1/2011) is a milestone in this regard. The present article aims at capturing some recent configurations of the Romanian higher education system, while making the links with its positioning within the larger European and global environments. The role of international processes and their influence on Romanian higher education policy debates are described, in an attempt to provide the background against which the articles included in the present volume can be read in a contextualised manner. Continuity and innovation, policy initiatives and impact assessment through research and data collection are all weaved together in the fabric of the higher education sector, in which one can always find some seeds of the future Romanian society.

In this article we set to analyze the policy measures that have been initiated and experimented in the Romanian higher education sector in order to reduce the information asymmetry between the education providers and the rest of stakeholders. The need for higher education policies is triggered by the public nature of the education and also by the information disparities and gaps that are inherent given the long-term investment character of the services provided. In this context, there are several transparency tools available, ranging from state intervention to sector self-regulation. The article assesses the potential ex-ante impact of different policy options and of the implementation of U-Multirank in Romania in particular and argues that sector self-regulation through voluntary participation in U-Multirank complemented by the development of a benchmarking system would be the most feasible policy option for enhancing the transparency and social responsibility of higher education institutions in Romania.

Despite legal provisions in place since 2005, Romanian universities are considered to perform internal quality assurance only at a formal level, on paper, and usually in anticipation of external evaluations demanded by the government or other official institutions. This paper posits five hypotheses to explain this situation. We analyze 187 interviews with people in universities in order to evaluate these hypotheses. Only two hypotheses are confirmed by the data, allowing us to construct a narrative of policy failure. First, there are top-down failures resulting from unclear and inconsistent legal provisions that focus on multilayered evaluation procedures. Second, there are bottom-up failures related to the lack of ownership over internal quality assurance systems by the actors in the universities. The existing procedures are often seen as control-tools of government, and understood as disconnected from the universities’ own goals and problems. Consequently, people on the ground passively try to subvert these tools by carrying them out in a ritualistic manner—which is why quality assurance cannot become internalized.

Since 1989, Romania has gone through over two decades of higher education reforms. While the student population had one of the biggest increases in Europe, from 192.810 students in 1990/1991 to 907.353 students in 2008/2009, it had dropped drastically to 464.592 students by 2012. If the situation has improved in terms of access of a higher number of students to higher education, compared with 1990, higher education continues to favour the wealthiest segments of the population. Even though Romania has several commitments at the European level regarding equity in higher education (Bologna Process, Europe 2020 Strategy), the data show low participation rates for students from disadvantaged groups such as rural students, students from low-income families, disabled students or Roma students. Learning from the national policies which did not translate into institutional realities, the article tries to establish how Romania’s commitments regarding equity in higher education within the Bologna Process are framed into national policies and how higher education institutions understand the concept of “equity” in terms of implementing the national policies or developing their own, with an emphasis on access and participation in higher education.

The aim of this paper is to present a logical framework for evaluation capacity building in higher education agencies, which can be used as an instrument both for grounding future educational policies, and for improving the policies’ implementation process. The logical framework will focus on four main stages that will examine the link between organizational evaluation capacity building and the process of organizational learning. Thus, we discuss the way in which evaluation practice is becoming a routine at the micro level (within the organization) through expert team learning and organizational learning processes and diffuses at macro level (within the system) through system learning and interactions at the system level. These learning processes facilitate the development of institutional characteristics such as evaluation capacity, policy implementation and leadership. The organizational learning process is seen as being founded on a cyclic model of shaping evaluation priorities and developing evaluation structures, selecting evaluation models, training evaluation skills, transforming evaluation into routine and reshaping evaluation priorities once again. To this end, several uses of evaluation practice in the Romanian higher education system are analysed.

From an educational policy perspective, student centred learning (SCL) is a rather new concept. It has emerged in recent years in national and institutional policy documents, often as part of rather declarative and formal approaches. Such policies are frequently lacking a clearly articulated definition of the concept and its effective operationalization. SCL is a new concept in Romania as well, and its adoption has not been free of difficulties. It is due to the influence of the Bologna Process that SCL is currently becoming an integral part of the strategic framework of universities. The article analyses the understanding of the SCL concept from the perspective of Romanian universities, as well as the extent to which it has been internalized within their processes and practices. The article looks at SCL from two different perspectives: curriculum development (in terms of using learning outcomes and the ECTS) and teaching (in terms of pedagogy and quality assurance). At the same time, the analysis specifically tracks Romania’s commitments regarding SCL within the Bologna Process, and in the broader national higher education policy context.

Internationalisation of higher education is high on the agenda of most universities in the European Union, European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and beyond. Romanian universities are increasingly focusing on developing institutional internationalisation strategies in which they aim for both quality enhancement through mainstreaming international elements in curricula and diversifying their academic communities (with incoming and outgoing students and staff). The article maps policies and practices regarding internationalisation of education in the Romanian higher education at the national policy level, but also offers a few perspectives from the institutional level. Several institutional case studies were comparatively analysed, from the point of view of perceptions on internationalisation and institutional behaviour, while taking into consideration the European and global context. The data used for the article was collected within the frame of a project implemented by the Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding (UEFISCDI) and funded through the European Social Fund, titled: ‘

In this article we investigate both the evolution and the current state of the public policies regarding student subsidies in post-communist Romania. We look into how the criteria on which student subsidies are distributed reflect an “equity” or a “quality” approach. This normative perspective is completed with a statistical account of the categories of students who appropriate student subsidies. We argue that quality was the staple criterion for the distribution of student subsidies over the past decade and that the present arrangements have significant shortcomings from both an “equity” and a “quality” perspective. We conclude that the current context is favourable for a shift towards a more balanced relation between quality and equity, due to the expansion of the support schemes and the distribution of student subsidies to more numerous and heterogeneous categories of students.

The article investigates the evolution of quality constraints for higher education institutions in Romania using the framework of principal-agent theory. Two related subjects are broadly covered: one is the evolution of the quality constraints themselves (in terms of accreditation and quality assessment mechanisms); the other is the incorporation of quality components in the actual allocation of funds to public universities. Throughout the article elements of student equity and access which operate within the framework of quality evaluation are highlighted and the impact of this framework on the funding process is assessed. It is found that general quality considerations play an increasingly important role in the funding of public universities but that equity and access elements have a limited role within quality evaluation. Nonetheless, in addition to their indirect impact mediated by quality assessment, such elements have recently also taken a more articulated form within the funding mechanism itself.