Premises and Barriers of Inclusive Access and Successful Participation of Roma People in Higher Education in Romania

The Romanian Higher Education (HE) system functions in an European context that promotes and supports the development of an inclusive education that offers the chance to qualitative education for all. However, despite some recent efforts, Roma people are still among the vulnerable groups that are under-represented in the third cycle education. The paper builds an overview of the current context of implementing public policies targeting the Roma Youth in Romania, with a focus on special designated study grants offered for them at HE level. In order to determine the impact of current equity and access policies, the paper revises the previous studies on this issue, analyses the Romanian regulations in comparison with the international recommendations, analyses the data collected from the eight universities considered study cases. Doing this, the paper identified the problems these young Roma persons face when acceding to HE and the factors that supplementary concur to their early drop-out (cultural background, poor financial situation, lack of support from their families, lack of traditional role models etc.). In this challenging context, specially designated study grants for roma candidates seem to be insufficient in solving the issue without being backed up by support mechanisms put in practice at earlier stages of their education process. Moreover, the efforts undertaken by HEIs seem to be the result of a mimetic process of copying the mechanisms introduced by an institution considered to be a role –model in the field or a success in answering the requests of the financing body.