Social effects triggered by the expansion of higher education in Romania

The recent expansion of higher education in Romania triggered significant social changes in the composition of the country’s student population. Despite the presumption of meritbased admission, prior to 1990 the student body was mostly urban, the massive expansion of university places starting in the early 1990s opened the doors to higher education to a wider category of people. Additionally, certain policies were introduced to increase the access of minorities to higher education. This paper analyzes the characteristics of the student population in terms of gender, place of primary residence (urban/rural) and ethnicity, and it looks at whether the expansion of education contributed to the decrease in structural inequalities between the ethnic Hungarian and Roma minorities and the ethnic Romanian majority population.