Atmosphere at the Faculty of Law during the student protests Belgrade, June 1968. PHOTO: ARCHIVES OF YUGOSLAVIA

Atmosphere at the Faculty of Law during the student protests Belgrade, June 1968. PHOTO: ARCHIVES OF YUGOSLAVIA

Peer-reviewed articles Theme: Universities in times of crisis and transformation The economic role of higher education, science, and technology in late socialist Yugoslavia

As the economic crisis in socialist Yugoslavia escalated in the late 1970s, the role of education, science, and technology in revitalizing self-management socialism and the economy became a hotly debated issue. Just as the number of universities more than doubled during the 1970s, they started to be criticized for producing unemployable graduates who burdened the economy instead of contributing to it, and for curtailing the upward social mobility of working-class youth. The paper examines the contemporary discussions of the economic purpose of higher education and presents “technocratic” and “anti-technocratic” positions in the debate which occasionally depicted the universities as responsible for the crisis, but also as potentially uniquely suited for resolving it– and thus reversing what many commentators saw as the country’s slide towards scientific, technological, and economic dependency and peripheralization.

Published in the printed edition of Baltic Worlds BW 2025:1 pages 60-73
Published on balticworlds.com on April 16, 2025

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abstract

As the economic crisis in socialist Yugoslavia escalated in the late 1970s, the role of education, science, and technology in revitalizing self-management socialism and the economy became a hotly debated issue. Just as the number of universities more than doubled during the 1970s, they started to be criticized for producing unemployable graduates who burdened the economy instead of contributing to it, and for curtailing the upward social mobility of working-class youth. The paper examines the contemporary discussions of the economic purpose of higher education and presents “technocratic” and “anti-technocratic” positions in the debate which occasionally depicted the universities as responsible for the crisis, but also as potentially uniquely suited for resolving it– and thus reversing what many commentators saw as the country’s slide towards scientific, technological, and economic dependency and peripheralization.

KEYWORDS: Socialist Yugoslavia; economic crisis; higher education; socialist university; science policy; R&D; technocracy

Download the full paper as a pdf in the upper right corner.

Vedran Duančić

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