The Changing Role of Universities in Lithuanian Society

Abstract

The Lithuanian Republic was re-established on 11 March 1990 after the fall of the USSR, marking the beginning of a wave of reforms in the country’s higher education (HE) sector. The prevailing assumption had been that, as a Soviet society, Lithuania enjoyed a high level of education at the tertiary level.Yet, the facts of the matter speak differently; during the Soviet period, only about 10% of the general population went on to obtain HE qualifications.Moreover, throughout the country, HE’s development remained patchy. While it is fair to say that technical-related fields such as medicine and mathematicswere sufficiently developed, the same could not be said for the social and humanitarian sciences, which had been under constant surveillance throughout the occupation. During the Cold War, the Communist authorities required these educational fields to serve the purposes of Soviet ideology and reinforce the merits of the regime, all of which had little or nothing to do with education.