Hustle Over the Higher Education Law!

Everybody wants to change the law but we cannot agree on a new law.

Why?

In my eyes, the law represents much more than a simple university law.

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The Higher Education Council oversees the whole higher education system in the country and all universities, public or private, report to this council.

The power within the Council is tremendous as they can directly create "hell" or "heaven" for every academic in the country with their decisions.

The rectors of the universities appointed by the Council — actually the Council proposes three nominees for each post and the President appoints one of them — share this tremendous power in accordance with the guidance of the Council.

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Last week, the government made some changes in the famous law and has created hell among the members of the Higher Education Council and some university rectors.

The government has cut the authority of these people to a large extent.

But in fact, what the government did last week cannot be called reform at all as the changes only aim to overcome certain areas of the whole problem.

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Those who argue against the changes do not seemingly react to the elimination of their authority, in fact all of the Council members will be re-appointed, but complain about the government attempting to create religious rule by taking over the universities.

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Their argument can be summarized as:

We have a university entrance system, the so-called "central examination" that measures who will go to which university and faculty based on enumeration of students with this test.

The central exam is a typical standard test prepared in accordance with the curriculum of classical high schools but also applies a "negative multiplier" to discourage the so called "professional high schools" graduates from attending areas out of their specialization.

Thus the graduates of "professional schools" not only take a standard test not based on their curriculum but also face a negative multiplier in this selection procedure. (i.e. if their score in the standard test is 100, the multiplier 0.8 brings their score down to 80)

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The so-called "professional high schools" also include the religious schools i.e. imam-hatips and these schools are taken to be anti-secular schools by some although they are totally public schools.

The government is now eliminating the "negative multiplier" for all professional schools and the Kemalists take this as an attempt to take over the bureaucracy by training imam-economists, imam-lawyers, imam-judges etc., by enabling imam-hatip graduates to attend any faculty if they succeed in the standard entrance exam.

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The core of Turkish education consists of eight years of compulsory education and three years of high school making a total of 11 years.

Before 1998, the system was 5+3+3=11 years where the first three years after the five were called middle schools.

These three years were also part of professional high schools and thus the total education years in these schools were six.

Now, given that the middle schools were united with primary education, the professional schools have already been squeezed into three years and that is already a big complaint on behalf of those who say "we cannot train professionals. If we take a look at the figures; there are 13.686 million students at the pre-university (11 years) level.

Some 10.331 million of these students are attending the eight year-primary schools and 3.035 million students are in the three year-high schools.

Out of these figures only 981,224 students are at professional high schools.

Thus the percentage of professional school students has been 32 percent for the last three years or 7 percent among the total student population.

On the other hand, there are only 71,100 students in imam-hatips!

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Thus the percentage of imam-hatip students to:

a) Three year-professional high schools is 7 percent!

b) The whole student body attending three year-high schools is 2 percent!

c) The whole eleven years pre-university student body is barely a 0.5 percent!

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Those who say that if we eliminate "the negative multiplier" bureaucracy soon will be dominated by Islamists i.e. those who are scared of the possibility of imam-judges, imam-lawyers, imam-managers in their words at the public institutions etc. Are saying that this very 0.5 percent — say 7 percent at best! — will all be winners in a standard test that measures knowledge on a curriculum they have not been trained in!