[edit] Higher educationMain article: List of universities in Romania Babes-Bolyai UniversityIn any country higher education is the moment of truth for the entire society. With many pressures from technical developments, a deficiency in designing higher education is a very costly endeavor paid by a country. The qualified job market suffers directly and one of the numerous direct consequences will be the decreasing number and quality of teachers and professors involved in the educational system. Unfortunately, this is the case in Romania, wherethe educational system still has many gaps, in contrast to the well establishednational educational systems in the US, Canada or Western European countries.

The first modern Romanian universities are:

University of Iasi (1860)University of Bucharest (1864)Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj (1872)In Romania, after 1990, the universities were the first type of institutions that started the reforms for democratization of education. They achieved autonomy,an impossible goal during the socialist regime. Students had been a very activesocial category participating in the social protests in the years 1956, 1968 and 1989. After 1990, they formed a very radical offensive campaign aimed against communist politicians. The University Square movement began when, around the University of Bucharest, these students proclaimed a communist free zone, installed tents around the area and protested for over 40 days demanding that communist statesmen be dismissed from public functions. Additionally, they demanded the autonomy of mass-media. However, Romanian students movements were a model for other neighboring countries. For instance, Bulgarian students made an alliance with union syndicates and protested through marathon demonstrations and strikes. The difference in that case was that their union syndicates were strong allies of students. Also, their movement was less radical but more powerful and realistic. In this case, they succeeded to dismiss some communist leaders. In Ukraine, the social movements from the end of 2004 against electoral frauds had the same structure. Universities have full autonomy, in stark contrast from the pre-university segment. Each university is free to decide everything from their management to the organization of classes. Furthermore, many universities devolve this autonomy further down, to each department. Thus, there are huge differences between universities and even between individual departments inside a university.