Admin(istr)ator in the Jungle (Higher Education: National Statistical Reports and Assessment of State-
funded Quota of Students)
Kövesi-Nagy Dániel
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SZTE Egyetemi Számítóközpont
The development of the national electronic registers in the Hungarian higher education has a long term history. On the contrary, the evolved complex solutions have a very considerable inertia due to the multiplicity of the actors and the underdetermination of processes. Moreover, the legal and the social environment is constantly changing, therefore, both the developers and the operators of student administration systems face a great challenge.
Our paper gives a practical outline of the efforts of the student administration support staff at the Computer Centre, University of Szeged, to meet these challenges during the automatization of two tasks of administrative procedures. These two tasks are the generation of the national annual statistical reports, and the assessment of the current value of the state-funded quotas in order to maintain the students’ financing status. Both tasks were important issues in the original topics of the National Higher Education Information System.
The complex environment leads to a redundancy and indeterminacy in the local student administration systems. Therefore successful IT solutions require a good quality of basic data sets and data records. To achieve this, effective communication has to be developed among the actors of the administration procedures and this must be combined with regular monitoring.
Similar problems arise on a national level. The practical experiences obtained from the local student administration systems may have an improving effect on the recent developments of the National Higher Education Information System. Before setting up a nationwide public register, a strict policy has to be designed in order to allocate the specific responsibilities for the data content elements.