Downward Trend in the Number of Teachers in Romania and Possible Causes

Abstract

After the fall of communism in 1989, the Romanian educational system had to go through some major transformation. Some of them being applied suddenly and previously unexamined have left less positive results. Our country was not yet ready to absorb new changes and that inevitably led to a decline in education standards, but also to a shortage of teachers. The following study shows the situation of teachers in Romania in terms of their decrease with the exposure on certain causes using mainly retrieved data from the National Institute of Statistics, afterwards processed in Microsoft Excel, in SPSS or in Eviews, fleetingly taking into consideration the condition of teachers from countries belonging to the European Union. And because the teaching profession is not as appealing as it was before, the study continues with a survey on the main features that a teacher is supposed to have from the perspective of students. In order to achieve this goal, conjoint analysis will be used on the collected data. Teachers should become once more role models for the new generations, and through the conducted research, the current paper also aims to provide an overview on what students require from their teachers in order to improve their performance.