Higher education in interwar Romania: from overcrowded universities to intellectual unemployment

Abstract

The present article’s goal is to reveal the Romanian universities malfunctions’ in recruiting and guiding the students towards specific higher education specializations. Incapable of becoming a social selector and thus a mechanism of social promotion, the university developed itself into a source of intellectual unemployment in an agrarian society. Thus, it is reasonable to create a causal link between intellectual unemployment and the ascent of the nationalistic political trends in the 1930s, as it was the legionary movement.

Keywords

• meritocracy
• social promotion
• overcrowded universities
• intellectual unemployment
• media debate