How Can Be Academic Talent Measured During Higher Education Studies? - An Exploratory Study

Many articles claim that talent management is a very important aspect of higher education. Despite of this, the studies, which investigate this topic empirically, are very rare. The Hungarian higher education talent management focuses mainly on academic-, scientific aspect of talent. So, the main purpose of talent-management is the academic reinforcement, namely, growing up a new generation of scientist/university teachers. The talent management in higher education can be imagined as a bridge between formal school studies and scientific career. In this study, I search answer for the (research) question- how should academic talent be measured during higher education studies? Moreover, does it have any sense to identify the academic talents during even their higher education studies? The research is based on opinion of 170 university teachers who supervised talented students during a young-researcher competition. The method was questionnaire-method. The questions gathered round two main topics- (1) identifying of talented students and cooperation with talented students; (2) own career of supervisor university teachers. The results had been analyzed with descriptive statistics which show the mostly chosen talent-identifying methods and features of talented students. The open-ended questions had been content-analyzed. The data of university-teacher’s career had been analyzed with mathematical statistical tests (ANOVAs, Two-sample T tests, correlations) where the dependent variable was the number of publication (as indicator of the scientific performance). The results may suggest conceptions for talent-programs (honor programs) based on academic talent; for doctoral schools, and for any other institutes who works with career entrant scientist. The scientific reinforcement would be more effective if scientific programs/scholarships/PhD-programs used professional methods during selection process, instead of subjective choices, based on CV and motivation letter.