Southeast Europe

6.5.3 Higher education and research
According to Romanian Government statistics, ethnic Hungarians pursuing their
education in Romania have the same chances and choices as their ethnic Romanian
counterparts. During the academic year 1996/1997 there were 10,000 ethnic Hungarian
students enrolled in Romanian universities and other institutions of higher education
(Council for National Minorities, 1997:49). A recent report (1998) by the DAHR claims
that the number of students studying in Hungarian at secondary and higher levels has
been falling steadily for some time. The report also examines the numbers of ethnic
Hungarians studying in Romanian, especially in the field of law. In the 1995/96
academic years, only 98 (0.8%) out of 11,932 law students throughout Romania were
ethnic Hungarian. This poses an obvious problem for those Hungarians living in more
isolated communities to find a Hungarian-speaking lawyer. The DAHR made the above
statistics more widely known, and thus succeeded in securing a further 30 places for
Hungarian students at the Faculty of Law in the Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj-
Napoca. The Alliance acknowledges, however, that such measures are “no safeguard for
a new generation of lawyers” (DAHR, 1998).
According to 1996 statistics quoted in the DAHR report, of the 10,000 Romanians
surveyed, 2.2% had a university/college degree, while of the same number of
Hungarians, the percentage with a degree was just 1.5.
The right to education in the mother tongue has also led to an ongoing argument
concerning the language in which university entrance examinations may be held.
Currently, students may take such examinations on their subjects of studies in their
mother tongue. However, this has led to resentment among Romanian students and
others. They argue that students who have entered the university based on their results
of examinations taken in a language other than Romanian cannot perform as well as
Romanian students in that faculty. “Positive discrimination” or the allocation of
university places to Hungarian students purely because they are Hungarian is another
cause of dissatisfaction among the Romanian community with the university authority.
Yet, these claims do not take into account the imbalance of minority student ratios in
many faculties where the language of instruction is only Romanian, such as law, and
many faculties teaching technical subjects. The recent proposal to establish a
Hungarian-language university is due to the language bias against ethnic Hungarians
from entering certain technical and professional schools. There is a sufficient number of
Hungarians in Romania, particularly older people who live in more isolated areas, who
demand Hungarian-speaking doctors, lawyers, and other professionals. The Hungarian
minority’s desire to have a state university in the Hungarian language was viewed as a
form of “ethnic segregation in education.” APADOR-CH (the Romanian Helsinki
Committee) argues in its 1998 report that international standards and documents that
have been signed by Romania allow for the establishment of such an institution. It
examined the situation in states such as Finland where the Swedish minority has several
educational institutions in which they may pursue their studies in Swedish. This, in fact,
is the compromise that was eventually reached, with additional Hungarian and German
sections added to the Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj, although there was widespread
dissent expressed by forty-eight Romanian universities through the Romanian National
Civic Forum. It remains to be seen how effective the idea is in practice (APADOR-CH,
1998:141).
There is no Ph.D. education in the Hungarian language. Therefore, many students
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