THE SIGNIFICANT ISSUES WHICH AFFECTS THE QUALITY OF HIGHER EDUCATION SYSTEM IN TURKEY

Abstract

There are 184 higher education institutes (112 states owned, 67 foundation owned universities and 5 foundation community collages) in Turkey as of the end of 2017. The number of the students in the tertiary education is now 7,764, 607. Although the quantitative figures are encouraging the future of the higher education in Turkey, unfortunately many studies and reports show there are severe problem areas in the quality. These problems are laid in a large spectrum covering scientific autonomy, the quality of lecturers, new registered students, graduates, research studies, accreditation, international recognition, cooperation with industry etc. The aim of this study is not to produce proposals for these problems but a research to define high priority and important issues needs to be solved in short or medium term. To achieve that an expert group established to made a research on the previous studies and available data. As a result of this step a questionnaire for university lecturers has been designed based on the hypothesis created by expert group. The evaluation of this questionnaire is used to introduce most significant problem areas which need quick remedies. This is a prospecting study of results may be used by other researcher intents further studies to produce proposals to create remedies