Abstract:

The European Union has the competence to support, coordinate or supplement actions of the member states in the field of higher education, and via some programmes, like Erasmus and Horizon 2020 etc., helps students and teachers to cope with the new challenges, through an exchange of experience between the universities of the member states. Thus, the European Union looks to decrease the uncertainty that the students feel when they enrol or graduate from university.

In the moment when the student enters a higher education institution, he notices that the training is uncertain, the direction to which he is heading is unclear, the legislation in the field is constantly changing and the teachers have great expectations from their students. After graduating university, a student also notices that the degree of uncertainty rises due to the economic, social and political situation of his country, or geographical region, or the union that his country is part as a member state. Furthermore, there is not always easy access to jobs in the fields that the students studied in.

The objective of the article is to present the new challenges that the higher education faces, the impact of these challenges on the students and teachers and also to show that by applying adaptive management, at the level of the higher education institution and also at the level of the European Union, can be seen as a solution for the challenges that the higher education system faces.

The key part of the paper will be the analyses regarding the possibility of integrating adaptive management in the European strategies and documents in order to better answer the new challenges that the higher education faces.

The analysis will be made using the following methods:
1) the analytical method, with the help of which the factors (economic, social, political, technical etc.) that influence the educational system will be analysed, the new challenges that the educational system faces will be presented, but also the European Union’s policies will be analysed;
2) the theoretical method, through which the adaptive education, the adaptive management theory, but also the concept of adaptive teachers and adaptive students will be explained;
3) the comparative method, where the traditional education will be compared with the adaptive education and the strategies of the European Union will be compared with the ones in Romania, as a member state.

The expected result of the analysis will be to show that the strategies regarding the higher education institutions of the European Union and also of Romania, as a member state, can be improved by using adaptive management and adaptive management theory, so that no matter the challenges, the degree of uncertainty will be diminished so that the student can no longer feel uncertain ether when enrolling at a university or even after graduating, when he will be able to find a job in the field that he studied. Integrating adaptive management in the strategies and documents of the European Union can be considered a solution for some problems and it also can be an answer to the new challenges that the higher education faces.

Keywords:

Higher education, new challenges, adaptive management, European Union, Romania.