Every year the number of university places goes up, but the demand rises at an even steeper rate. Of those sitting the examination only about 15 percent are in their last year of high school. The rest are people re-sitting the exam in hope of an elusive chance to study (although a small percentage are already in study and hoping to change courses).This impressive feat of organization appears on the surface to be a fair and equitable way of distributing the scarce resource that is higher education in Turkey. The more sought after the course and more sought after the university, the higher the grade. The system works according to supply and demand and appears entirely meritocratic -- assuming you define merit as the ability to compete in a three-hour multiple-choice exam. In practice, however, privilege perpetuates itself through access to good lycées and to the fee-paying after-school “crammers” which drill teenagers to get results. Historically, about a third of those who sit the university entrance exam earn the right to continue education, but the best places go to the best trained.
The result, according to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) findings, is that Turks actually pay more for private schooling than many European contemporaries, including Germany and Finland. The question is whether they invest this money productively.
There is probably not a single person -- certainly not a single high school student -- who believes this is a perfect system. Yet devising one that would be fairer is not easy. Despite the woeful tales of Turkish university graduates chasing fewer and fewer jobs, higher education remains the key determinate of status and social mobility. One of the chief accomplishments of the Board Higher Education (YÖK), the highly centralized body that administers all Turkish universities, after nearly three decades has been to dramatically increase the number of student places.
With so much energy devoted to getting into university, it is at least understandable that public opinion is not really focused on what happens inside higher education itself. And with students judging themselves by their ability to compete for the “high point” courses in the best universities, they choose the best their exam success will “buy” and not what suits their temperament best. Tosun Terzioğlu, rector of Sabancı University, cites studies which suggest some 40 percent of the 5,000 top scorers in the entrance exam feel once they got to university that they were pressured to study the wrong thing.
Professor Terzioğlu made his remarks at a presentation of a report published this week by his university's İstanbul Policy Center. The document, titled “Why Higher Education Needs a New Vision,” accepts that much of the blame for the way high schools have been turned into factory farms is the result of the demands of the university examination system and the failure of universities to define themselves in a way that will meet the real aspirations of the students they should be trying to serve. This inflexibility is the result of the way universities are centrally administered through YÖK.
The founding vision of YÖK was to invest in higher education efficiently, to provide access to those previously excluded by expanding the higher education network to new towns and provincial centers, but also to prevent the re-politicization of university campuses after the 1980 military coup. The time has come for YÖK to relax its grip and allow universities more autonomy, according to Professor Üstün Ergüder, one of the report's co-authors.
One immediate effect of allowing universities a greater say in who they accept and why would be to lift some of the tyranny of the entrance examination. This in turn would allow high schools and lycées to reclaim the last two years for more purposeful education.
