The Police Academy is the Only One Admitting Students All Year

The authorities are, secretly for now, preparing a surprise for college staff: two-month compulsory leave in the summer and adequate wages - 80% of the current monthly salary. They have not made public their intention yet, they are allegedly waiting for the June exams and the freshmen enrolment to end. If this really happens, it will mean that the state is relying on the attested patience of its university staff. The staff is not complaining about low salaries (at least not publicly), nor about the shortage of books and teaching material, nor about the lower quality of teaching, lack of space, outdated equipment, nor about the "abolished" future of the youth they are educating. The university takes part in the latter directly, enrolling almost 50,000 new students, 34,662 of them in colleges and 13,616 in junior colleges. The state pays for the education of half of the students at one of the 81 Serbian colleges.

In the recent years, the Republic of Serbia has independently decided how many students would enrol each year, the sole criterion being money and the number of vacancies at the colleges. Future and employment will be dealt with later. The Serbian Employment Bureau currently has 763,303 unemployed on its lists: more than 26,000 of them have college degrees.

Both the educated and uneducated have trouble finding a job. State firms do not yearn for non-qualified workers any more. Out of 135,000 unqualified workers, 20,000 of them have been waiting for job for over 10 years, another 40% for over 5 years. Over 47% of three-year secondary-school graduates have been waiting for a job for over three years. High-school students, 130,000 of them unemployed in central Serbia alone, find a job after three years on the Bureau at an average.

At first glance, college graduates fare best in these statistics: 21% of them find a job after five years of waiting, 38% after three years.

The state has opened the college doors wide to students, lowered the enrolment criteria, guaranteed social peace, and protected its impoverished budget by introducing self-financing. The price of education is paid by the parents, who do not know what to do with their children if they do not go on to college. In essence, all of them are putting of the problem for a few years, or indefinitely, which is how long college can take in this country.

One thousand nine hundred students start as freshmen at the Belgrade College of Economy this autumn. The same college exists also in Subotica, Kragujevac, Novi Sad and Nis. The situation with medical and law colleges is similar.

Both the professors and the students are trying to pass through this general educational chaos as painlessly as possible; the former are soldiering on in abnormal working conditions, the latter only want to pass their exams. Those, who know the university situation well, say that higher learning has become a school of memorising, not thinking, and that the few gifted students pay the toll. The university's real struggle with the uneducated generations is yet to come. Nearly 50,000 of this year's freshmen graduated from high-school in unnatural circumstances: under the sanctions, in poverty, amid strikes of their impoverished teachers, without a carefree youth, a fewer future opportunities, boiling down to further education, the street or illegal employment in cafes or boutiques...

Local politicians had once promoted education, to boost their own interests and hope for a monument built in their home village. They discussed education in the assemblies and other socialist forms. The whole story of education is now reduced to the strike of high-school teachers, miserable wage increases and sporadic incidents. The schooling system is deteriorating, slowly but surely. The students are not striving for knowledge but for diplomas, dissatisfied teachers are giving private lessons, opening tourist agencies, trading.

Three years ago, the Serbian Employment Bureau set up a Talent Fund. Depending on vocation and the so-called needs, everyone whose average grade at the University exceeds 8.5 (the grades ranging from 6-10) can apply to work on projects, lasting between one and two years.

Zivomir Tesic, head of the Belgrade Employment Bureau branch office, explains the Fund's importance now, when it is impossible to review the need for college graduates. "This way, we involved 959 college graduates last year, and another 781 in the first half of 1996, in one-year or longer projects, in institutes, colleges or firms. The Employment Bureau provides them with wages during the project duration and pays their taxes and wage contributions. Some of them go on to work as employees after the project is over. There is also a program for trainees. They get 80% of the wage from us. The training lasts a year, or even longer if the trainee is to take the bar exam. The number of unemployed college graduates fell from 12,600 in 1993 to over 5,000 this way." Tesic says it is hard to find a job today and assesses around 50,000 of the unemployed, registered with the Employment Bureau, are working illegally.

The huge Belgrade University is taking everything. The best and the worst in Serbia. The provincial universities are mostly filled by the mediocre and the worst. Belgrade professors free-lance there, the students are waiting for a chance to switch to a Belgrade college. All of the universities issue diplomas of equal validity and all of them are educating future Employment Bureau applicants. According to the current rates of graduation and employment, Serbia's five medical colleges will turn out a surplus of 7,000 doctors in the year 2000. The surplus of economists, lawyers and archaeologists is still unknown.

Judging by the Serbian Education Ministry publication "Find Yourself" issued this summer for outgoing elementary school students to help them choose a high-school which will guarantee them work in four years, the only vocation that can be obtained in high-school which this state will need are policemen. That is the only profession the state guarantees will be in shortage. It ranks first on the list of deficit professions in the publication. There is no number two.

Those who opted for three-year high-schools this summer have a choice of 44 vocations, including male hair stylists, nutritional technicians, car mechanics, wood-processing technicians, car-body mechanics, electricity technicians. The choice, therefore, boils down to a handicraft trade or the police. Or, to waiting for a job at the Employment Bureau.