Prague, Feb 10 (CTK) – The number of fresh university graduates nearly tripled in the Czech Republic over the last 15 years, but the quality of the study has lowered and university diplomas have been losing their importance, daily Hospodarske noviny (HN) wrote on Wednesday.
About 30,000 students graduated from universities in the Czech Republic in 2001, while it was 82,000 in 2015.
The increase has been caused first of all by the Czech effort to catch up with West European countries in which the number of graduates was markedly higher, the paper writes.
“However, the increase of freshmen was so steep that it had to be accompanied by pressure to lower the quality,” said Jan Cadil, rector of the private Unicorn College.
This had its consequences, HN writes.
Companies now want job applicants to have university education for positions, for which the passage of the final exams from a secondary school was enough some time ago. Firms are more interested in the job experience, knowledge of languages, stays abroad or even whether the applicant is a team player rather than in a university diploma.
A recent survey conducted for the J&T Banka bank confirmed that human resources officers are more and more interested in the activities that students perform outside the universities.
The British publishing house Penguin and foreign branches of PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young accountancy firms even announced that they would not take people’s study results at university into account when hiring new employees, the paper writes.
Nine out of ten Czech students who successfully finish secondary school try to enter university. Only one in ten goes to work immediately after leaving the secondary school, while in 2001 four out of ten acquired a full-time job at that moment.
“Almost all students from our school apply for university studies and I’d even say almost all of them are enrolled at universities. But this does not mean that all of them become graduates,” said Radko Sablik, head of the Smichov Secondary School of Industry in Prague.
Sablik said more and more students go to study abroad after leaving the secondary school.
He said he believes that a lower number of people should be allowed to study at universities in the country.
Education Minister Katerina Valachova does not agree with this opinion. “Our expert analyses show that we do not have too many university students compared with other European countries,” she said about the Czech university system.
In 2015, the Czech Republic had 68 universities and colleges, 26 public and 42 privates ones. In 2001, the country had 24 public and 20 private universities. Czech universities had nearly 350,000 students last year, while in 2001 they had over 200,000 students.
In 2015, the country had one university per 155,000, compared to one university per 203,000 in 2001.
