Governing Bulgaria Must be Easy

Oresharsky, Bobeva and Chobanov (right).

With the start of the new school year on September 15, some members of the Bulgarian cabinet need to adjust their schedules to fit their teaching responsibilities. The prime minister Plamen Oresharsky, the vice - Daniela Bobeva, and the minister of finance Peter Chobanov will continue teaching classes at the University for National and World Economy (UNWE), reported Trud (part 1 and part 2). The news came from the  UNWE Finance Department Chair Docent Stoyan Alexandrov. The three members of the cabinet are faculty at the department. Docent Alexandrov also said that they will be allowed to teach only half of their typical academic load to allow for their government responsibilities.

The specific classes they will teach have not been announced yet. In the past, prime minister Oresharsky has taught investment and financial management. Peter Chaboanov has taught monetary theory and monetary policy as well as international finances. Daniela Bobeva has taught monetary theory and monetary policy, banking and a masters class in banks and international finance. Prime minister Oresharsky already has experience combining teaching and governing - he did not interrupt his lectures between 2005 and 2009, when he served as a minister of finance.

To get back to the title, governing Bulgaria must not be all that hard, if you don't even need to quit your day job.

Science and Education for Intelligent Growth

Several news outlets reported last week that Brussels has commented on the Bulgarian project for an operational program titled "Science and Education for Intelligent Growth". The program will cover the period 2014 to 2020. Such operational programs allow the individual EU countries to set internal funding priorities, within the predefined broad EU development goals. This allows countries to tailor funding to their specific conditions and target spending to areas that need it most. If, for example, Bulgaria receives the 1.5 billion it is asking for, the money can be used to improve science infrastructure (for example) by opening grant opportunities within Bulgaria. Without the program funding, projects to improve science infrastructure will be judged at the EU level, where such awards are much more competitive.

Rumors that such a project was under way have been making the rounds since last December, but according to official documents work didn't actually start until March. In any case, the scientific community is quite excited that such a program is being prepared. During prior EU funding periods Bulgaria has not asked for dedicated science funds even though such opportunities did exist. This is generally regarded as failure of previous governments.

Trud, Capital and several smaller news outlets, such as Offnews, reported that an initial version of the proposal has been submitted to Brussels. During the visit of Prime Minister Oresharsky, he received feedback about the proposal. The European Commission (EC) has expressed concerns over the poor coordination between different ministries and overlap between the goals of the science program with those for human resources and competitiveness. There are also concerns whether the Ministry of Education has the administrative capacity to manage such a program.

Trud quotes Vice-Prime Minister Zanaida Zlatanova saying that that there is a readiness to revise the priorities set in the proposal to ensure that there are money for science and education. "The goal of the program is to reform education and to adequately finance science." The European Commission recommended that more attention is given to reforms of the secondary and post-secondary education. She adds: "During the last four years the EC has been pointing out the pressing need for a strategy on how to reform secondary education. It is only logical that such a strategy is part of our priorities for the proposal. Currently, we have no strategy for reforms in higher education. We expect to have one by the end of the year."

The daily Capital criticizes that there is a danger that the program becomes a substitute for the lack of national policy. The quote from Minister Zlatanova suggests exactly that. Concerns over the slowly sinking ship of Bulgarian secondary education did not inspire any recent government to create a strategy to reform it until the promise of European funding appeared on the horizon. The situation is much the same with science. Such hasty strategizing does not bode well for either science or education. Ideally, a healthy strategy should respond to the need for reform, should be used to implement policy within the country, and should cover a long period of time. Such a strategy should NOT be shoehorned to fit into a call for operational programs which only provides money but no legislative pressure and only lasts 6 years - a period too short to see if such a strategy is indeed working.

The myth of the overproduction of academic titles: Part II

In a recent post I showed that, contrary to persistent rumors, there is no large increase in the number of new academic titles in Bulgaria following the 2010 law which allowed universities to promote their own docents and professors. This earlier analysis however relied on only one post-2010 point to make this conclusion. Here is a further analysis based on post-2010 data published by the Bulgarian Academy of Science earlier this year. The source of the data can be found here (in Bulgarian).

First let's compare the years where the database data and the BAS data overlap - the period between 2007 and 2009. As expected the database data falls bellow the BAS data indicating incompleteness in the database. This incompleteness is more notable for the docents (some 200 people more per year) than for the professors. Since no official data exists, it is difficult to trace to source of such a discrepancy.

Even more striking is the difference between the BAS and the Ministry of Education data for 2012 - the difference is a factor of 2. I would have expected that the data will be similar, considering how recent it is. Such a difference casts a certain amount of doubt on both datasets. How difficult could it be to count the number of academic titles in 53 universities? 

The BAS data is quite poorly formatted so the following was done to make it fit for plotting. The BAS report gives data for the folloing periods: Jan - Mar 2011 and Mar 2011 - Mar 2013. Additionally it notes that 666 new docent titles have been received during the Jan - Mar 2013 period. I assume that the fraction of docent for 2013 relative to the full number for the two years - 68.4% - is the same for the professors. I then add the Jan - Mar 2011 data to the 0.316x(Mar 2011 - Mar 2013) to get the total number of titles for 2011 and 2012. Finally I divide this by two assuming the numbers for the two years are equal. Presumably, BAS has the full data on this. Why they chose to present it in this odd way, is unclear to me.

The BAS report makes the point that in the first three months of 2013 there is a dramatic rise of the number of new academic titles, but that rise only comes after a striking dip during the previous two years. During 2011 and 2012, the number of new docents was 3 times lower than prior years. The number of new professors was 20% less. Therefor, it is not surprising to see a clearing of this huge backlog in the beginning of 2013. In order to make up for the dip, 2013 might see over 1100 new docents. The number of new professors is again larger than that of previous year, by a factor of 3, slightly larger but comparable to the conclusion reached with the database.

Another interesting question would be to find out what is the total number of docents and professors as a function of time, because this will show us not just the new hires, but the growth relative to the existing faculty. Unfortunately, I could not find such data. Random Google hits show that in 2008 there were ~1300 professors and that docents were over 10,000.