Centre for the Development of Education (CDE)

From its beginning in 2003, Center for Development of Education through its various activities contributes to better quality of higher education in Serbia. Through researching, analyzing and proposing innovative policies in fields of education, trainings and employment, Center had great impact on bettering the quality of higher education system.

As one of the important achievements, the project “Education Reform in Serbia: National Council for Vocational Education” has been conducted in period 2006 – 2009, and the goal of this project was establishment of the National Council for Education.

Through its activities of supporting and networking actors in the development of education on regional and international level, CDE provided its expertise services to European Training Foundation – ETF, for its activities in Serbia. In 2005 Center supported regional magazine “Education and Development”. In the period 2005 – 2008, eight issues of this magazine were published, on Serbian and English language.

Corruption in higher education, as one of the biggest problems in the system of higher education, was the next area where CDE continued its activities. Center had conducted projects which targeted corruption in higher education and offered solution for this problem.

Even thought “hard” types of corruption (as for example bribe is) are not so acute because of low presence, other types of corruptive acts are happening quite often in big number of institutions and they have big impact on lowering the quality of studies. The second problem, except smaller amount of knowledge and skills that students gain, is the fact that students believe that corruption deeds are quite common and normal. They don’t recognize certain deeds in their faculties as corruptive, and when they finish their studies they have greater tolerance on corruption, since they perceive it as socially acceptable.

CDE managed to introduce the subject of corruption in higher education as an important part of public discourse – before that corruption was linked to other areas of society (customs, judiciary and public health care) most of the time. Having in mind that the first step in coming to solution to some problem is to identify the problem, this can be taken as significant contribution to fight for more quality and justice in Serbian system of higher education.

Recognizing transparency as the main obstacle to corruption in higher education, CDE started researching and raising transparency of faculties in Serbia.