The European Higher Education Area from Central and Eastern European Perspective

Discussant: Liviu Matei, CEU's Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, and Professor at the Department of Public Policy

Moderator: Jana Bacevic, visiting research fellow at CEU’s Department of public policy

Ms. Deca provided a brief historical and geographical overview of the development of the European higher education area, and analyzed the content of this process and potential issues in its future development, as well as its implications for Central and Eastern European higher education systems. Prof. Liviu Matei as discussant, provided insights into the most important issues ‘facing’ higher education systems and institutions in Central and Eastern Europe in the near future. The lively discussion that evolved included many questions concerning the architecture or implementation of the Bologna declaration, but also some fundamental questions such as the role of quality assurance and accreditation processes in Europe.

Ligia Deca is the newly appointed Head of the Bologna Secretariat based in Bucharest. She was the Chairperson (2008-2010) of the European Students’ Union (ESU). As a Chairperson, she was the main policy and organisational coordinator of ESU, while being the official ESU representative in the Bologna Follow-Up Group, the European Union Lisbon higher education setting and UNESCO. Her professional experience includes working in the Quality Assurance field by being active as a consultant in the development of quality management systems in various institutions (higher education institutions, public institutions and private companies) and by taking part in both internal and external institutional Quality Assurance evaluations (such as the EUA Institutional Evaluation Programme). She was also the coordinator of the Coalition for Clean Universities - a campaign aimed at fostering academic integrity and fighting corruption in the Romanian educational sector.