Prague - Czech society is getting more educated.
In the past seven years, the number of graduates has doubled at Czech universities. While in 2000 there were more than 30 thousand graduates, seven years after there are 63 thousand young people leaving with academic degrees.
Those are the data of the Institute for Information on Education.
In the Czech Republic, you can choose from 68 universities, with 43 of them being private institutions. In 2000, there were only 8 private universities.
Graduate in three years
At present, over 344 thousand students are studying at universities in the Czech Republic. Especially shorter, three-year bachelor´s degree programs' popularity is on the rise - currently, they have more than 200 thousand.
This is because universities are continually introducing foreign-inspired model of two-tier university study. Formerly, compact five-year master degree programs slowly disappear in favor of the three-year bachelor programs with consequential master studies that take two or three years.
Bachelor studies for the school year of 2007/08 saw 55 thousand students, the number seven times larger than the number of those enrolled for master studies.
If compared with bachelor studies, the number of master´s degree programs is smaller and also fewer students are accepted.
Higher professional schools
Growing number of short study programs offered by universities are luring away students that would otherwise be interested in studying at the higher professional schools (Vyšší odborná škola).
There are 177 of these institutions in the Czech Republic, which have almost 29 thousand students, with 12 thousand studying their first year.
A relatively significantly high number of students opted for distance learning that allows them to do their study duties at home instead of attending classes in person. These students usually show up in school a few times in a month.
The most popular subjects are medicine, economics, pedagogy or social care.
Last year, more than six thousand have graduated at higher proffesional schools, with only about one thousand of them signed as distance students - the rest attended classes on regular basis.
