19TH IGWT SYMPOSIUM “COMMODITY SCIENCE IN RESEARCH AND PRACTICE CURRENT ACHIEVEMENTS AND FUTURE CHALLENGES†, 15th-19th SEPTEMBER 2014,CRACOW, POLAND

The universities in our country, like others in Europe, pass through major changes that must help them meet increasingly important challenges. The last decade has been marked by changes produced in the higher learning institutions in European countries, following the transformations generated by the Bologna Process in the academic world. In Austria, Spain, Germany different initiatives regarding the way of making change happen in higher learning institutions have taken place. Keeping this in mind we considered as necessary an analysis of the opinion of academic educational services consumers in Romania, linked to the changes registered following this reform. This research represents something new for the Romanian academic environment, because such an analysis has not been made before on the level of the economic university environment. We were interested especially in the opinions of the students which follow the courses of the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies (the most prestigious Romanian institution of this type, which has marked a century of existence last year). The paradigm change, from the traditional perspective on education towards a knowledge society perspective implies the need for higher and higher competitiveness of the educational systems.