What is the Role of Higher Educational Institutions in Managing their Students’ Competencies?

Abstract

Although the mission of higher educational institutes is - besides producing new knowledge via original and applied researches - to educate (young) people and equip them with knowledge, information and skills in order to increase their employment opportunities, the number and relative ratio of those unemployed despite having higher than secondary education is constantly growing in Hungary. Only 42% of employers think that employees are ready for employment upon graduation and only half of the young graduates believe that their post-secondary studies have improved their employment opportunities [8]. What is more, traditional HEI are usually not designed to react to the ever-changing market where skills depreciate quickly since they cannot constantly adjust their curricula at the pace the changing industry would require them to. Present paper endeavours to look into the means and tools of how one of Hungary’s biggest universities tries to deliver knowledge to its students and research, identify and analyse the deficiencies of the current system from the students’ point of view. Preliminary results of an ongoing research is presented, where students of Obuda University’s Keleti Faculty of Business and Management had to evaluate various methodologies’ - lectures, seminars, group work, and the internship along with participation on the Scientific Students’ Association’s Conference – on the basis of their efficiency in delivering knowledge and developing competencies.