‘Total budget of 127 public universities in Turkey is two thirds of Oxford’s budget’

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The 2022 budgets of the Ministry of National Education and the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure were debated at the General Assembly of the Parliament in Ankara yesterday (December 15).

İYİ Party Antep MP Hüseyin Filiz addressed the General Assembly about the budgets of universities in Turkey in this context. He underlined that "universities in the country have been facing a series of problems, ranging from their budgets to physical conditions, from education to research, from their students to faculty members, from the assistants to rectors."

Noting that "the total budget of Turkey's 127 public universities is 57 billion 740 million lira", Filiz said, "It is two thirds of the budget of the University of Oxford in the UK. What can our universities do with this budget of poverty? How can they compete with developed countries' universities?"

Rectors' academic qualifications, competence

The University of Oxford has nearly 25 thousand students and over 7 thousand academics. Its budget was 3.3 billion dollars in 2021. Boğaziçi University has 15 thousand students and 800 academics at its all campuses. The budget allocated to Boğaziçi by the state is 45 million dollars.

The highest amount of budget is allocated to foundation universities in Turkey. According to the "University Monitoring and Evaluation General Report" of the Council of Higher Education (YÖK), at the top of the list of universities in terms of "current expenditure per student" stand Koç and Sabancı universities, which are both foundation universities.

The same report also shows that the budget allocated to students and academics at public universities has been gradually dropping.

In addition to the universities' budgets, İYİ Party's Filiz also talked about the academic qualifications and competence of rectors: "Some rectors do not have international publications; some of them have received no citations. Boards do not have any importance or authority any longer. A rector serves as an acting dean or the same person is given several duties."

'68 rectors don't have international publications'

In 2019, Prof. Ergin Karadağ, an academic from Akdeniz University and the Director of its University Research Laboratory (ÜNİAR), spoke to bianet about his study "The Development of Universities in Turkey".

Emphasizing that the state of academia had been gradually deteriorating in Turkey, Karadağ indicated, "We do not rank among the top 500 universities of the world anymore. The way things stand, we will not even be among the top 1,000 universities of the world."

The academic briefly shared the following data:

"According to the data of Scopus and Web of Science, which compile international academic/scientific articles, 68 rectors in Turkey have never published an academic article in an international journal. They have published their works solely in Turkey.

"Moreover, the articles published by 71 rectors have never been cited in an international publication. These are all caused by a lack of meritocracy. The political structure appoints the people close to it as a rector, but, at least, appoint the qualified ones with an academic career.

"If they continue disregarding the success of university rectors, the already bad condition of academia in Turkey will deteriorate further. Today, we say that 68 university rectors do not have international publications, it will increase incrementally by tens and twenties."

Universities' quality decreasing

According to the 2019-2020 Academic Freedoms Report of the Science Academy (Bilim Akademisi), rectors and deans are not appointed based on meritocracy in Turkey. The report underlined that this situation decreased the quality of education at universities.

The report noted that "without any exceptions, in all universities presided by rectors with low academic qualities, their ranking has dropped in both the University Ranking According to Performance and in terms of knowledge production within two years of their appointment." (RT/SD)