CHALLENGES TO HIGHER EDUCATION IN SERBIA – A CONTRIBUTION TO THE PUBLIC DEBATE ON HIGHER EDUCATION REFORM

Higher education, as an area of great public interest, is the subject of a series of state actions, laws and allocation of financial resources. Reform/s in the field of higher education assume that we have identified problems in higher education and that we have criteria based on which we will evaluate reform solutions and opt for the one/s that best meet those criteria. The intention of this text is to contribute to the identification and understanding of some of the problems that public policies in the field of higher education should address and to offer criteria for evaluating the proposed solutions. As the basic problems of higher education (in Serbia) we have identified - the enlargement of the student population and the demand for quality control arising from the need to standardize every "serial" production, the need to expand the coverage of underrepresented social groups, the need for financial and other support for underrepresented social groups, which arise from the combination of enlargement and inclusiveness of higher education, the increase in the diversity of the student population in terms of abilities, aspirations, motivation and value orientations, and the need for innovations in teaching methods in higher education, which results from this.