Choices slim for many Turkish students

Turkish-born Pelin Kivrak, a Harvard University junior studying literature, recently returned from Istanbul, where she was a reporting intern for various magazine.

By Pelin Kivrak

ISTANBUL – It was an unbearably hot Monday afternoon. I was on a bus along the Bosphorus when I heard two teenage boys talking about their undergraduate plans. After a long conversation about their goals to study communications and sociology -- one of them ultimately sighed and said: “Dude, I think I have to keep practicing my headers.’’ As I was trying to make a connection between soccer moves and undergraduate studies, his friend satisfied my curiosity by asking him what he meant. The other one answered right away: ‘’A soccer player earns a lot more money and respect than a professor in this country.’’

He is right. Turkish college students pursuing academic careers in humanities and the social sciences, such as law, and high school students who would like to pursue an academic career in those fields have to make their own way to land some of the scarce financial opportunities. All this is separate from the fact that in a country facing rapid population proliferation and a recession, a single, brutal exam is the only way to supposedly funnel out the best students until the number of people who go to universities is somehow lowered.

The system works like this: Students take a single exam at the end of their senior year that covers all high school and middle school topics. After they receive their scoreiess, they are given 15 days to come up with a list of 15 colleges that they would like to attend. As an example, let’s say that College X’s law department accepts 40 people each year and the student who had the highest scores and did want to go to that institute the year before was received 350.76 and the minimum score was 312.98. So, people this year set their choices according to last year’s highest and lowest scores for that institutions and – believe me -- this is almost like playing the lottery. A lot of people each year cannot get into any places because of this central placement system although they have really high scores. And so thousands of students each year are placed into humanities departments -- and they're not likely to be those humanities-minded students of high quality.

High school seniors don’t have enough time or opportunities to figure out what they might want to do throughout their lives. And yet at age 16, at the end of their studies, they find themselves up against a brutal system that requires very hard theoretical work. They all must take the same 195-minute, multiple-choice exam, known as OSS, to realize their unique university goals. Students and their parents rail against the education system’s attempts to encompass a student’s entire body of academic work into such a test. rapid population proliferation and a recession, such an exam is the only way to supposedly funnel out the best students until the number of people who go to universities is somehow lowered.

Turkish people who lean toward social studies and humanities because they truly care about intellectual values and the importance of studying humanities are very few in quantity although usually very successful in quality. But it is not common for Turkish students to go after their passions in history or philosophy if they have the background and talent to study nanotechnology or financial engineering. If a student is very good at math, he or she is pressured by parents and the country’s economic situation to study engineering or finance although his biggest desire in life might be to study comparative literature or linguistics. Most of the students who study humanities are on such a path mainly because their scores are not sufficient to go to law school. The fact that students’ academic goals often do not match with their performances on the exam or with the expectations of their surroundings ultimately results in lack of dedication to their work.

Talat Halman, Turkey’s former minister of culture and current dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Letters at Bilkent University in Ankara, acknowledges all these problems. However, he is more optimistic about the future than the students themselves are. “I know that the internal problems of the system, when combined with the current financial recession, create serious problems for Turkey,’’ he says. “But from some other aspects, I do think that this combination might have some positive effects on the college education system.”

Although it sounds like a far stretch, he says this whole situation triggers a reverse brain-drain process. Because, he thinks, the top universities in countries like the United States or Britain will begin to employ less faculty, Turkish-born humanities professors will prefer to come back and work for the top schools in their countries instead of working for a second- or third-class institution overseas, where they will make more money and lead a better life.

Whether Halman is right, Turkey has a long way to go to reach a level where people are able to study and learn to specialize in what they truly want and where this independent choice is also efficient for the country’s economy. Until then, it shouldn’t be surprising to see the parks full of kids playing soccer rather than studying for the exams.

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