Our human capital and the state and contribution of our universities

While, with Turkey having made the largest natural gas discovery in its history in the Black Sea, there is rightly great joy, this finding should also lead us to draw attention to Turkey's distinctive features in development and to make our future plans on that basis. We have said before: Turkey has not made its development to date by relying on ready-made, God-given natural resources. Even so, it has pulled far ahead of countries with ready-made resources. So much so that ready-made natural resources can even be thought to have a negative contribution that holds back a country's development.

Today many countries, when they have no oil or gas, have no other economic power, resources or production to fall back on. In the end, the economies of these countries are instantly affected by fluctuations in oil prices.

Turkey, on the other hand, since it has no ready income from anywhere, knew-knows that it must build its own resources by investing in its own people. While this has been the policy of the AK Party, which has governed the country for 18 years, in fact the social structure has also adjusted itself accordingly. From people who, until thirty years ago, took part in economic life in Anatolia as small tradesmen or craftsmen, a very broad stratum has formed today that is integrated with the world economy, exports what it produces, and imports raw materials or technological infrastructure from all over the world in order to produce. Thanks to this, exports in Turkey have increased almost 5-6 times in 18 years. It is seen that the Anatolian people's capacity to integrate with the world economy secures the resources it needs through entrepreneurship and active relationship management.

When the subject is human capital, entrepreneurship, and the development of the industry and service sectors, its education dimension is a very important sociological reality. How far Turkey's old higher education infrastructure was from providing the breakthrough Turkey needs is seen much more clearly today. Today there is great benefit in attending to a comparison between past and present with respect to the very facile criticisms directed at the quality of universities.

First of all, it did not seem possible for the formerly highly ideological higher education to identify the general trends in the world and to train human resources in line with them. Of the 1.7 million high school graduate young people demanding higher education every year, at most ten percent could be given this opportunity, and nothing was offered to the rest; there was no planning or desire to increase capacity in order to admit more students, or to open new universities. Even in student admission, the main determining factor was not competence or ability but ideology. Therefore, while admission to university was entirely locked in an ideological approach through the headscarf ban and the coefficient practice, this was also, in a way, a shortcut to reducing the weight created by the unmet demand.

When education was this ideological, it also lacked quality, and it had neither an aspect nor a strength that could address the world. For that reason, while on average more than 50 thousand students from Turkey were always going abroad to study, the number of students coming from the world to study in Turkey did not even amount to a tenth of this. Turkey was running a serious trade deficit even in education. Yet today, with the number of universities in Turkey having tripled, while higher education opportunities are given as far as possible to all students who demand it, Turkish universities, with their performance of opening to the world and internationalizing so that foreign students can study, are now offering educational opportunities to several times the number of Turkish students studying abroad.

In fact, this alone is a very important indicator of how far universities in Turkey have come. Moreover, not only in central universities but even in the universities in the cities called provincial, you can today see hundreds, thousands of foreign students.

For instance, at Siirt University alone, in the past academic year, 2500 foreign students from 35 different countries were studying in all departments of the university. According to information I obtained from university officials, this number will exceed 3500 within this year. All these students, by further increasing the capacity of the TÖMERs whose infrastructure exists in the city, also receive serious Turkish language education, and they connect the university to the whole world exactly as it should be. Thus a Turkish student studying at the universities of Siirt, Bitlis, Kütahya, Muş and Bingöl feels and actually lives this universalization, universality or globalization even through classmates alone. In this way, he or she also gains in practice a more realistic and humane vision about the dimensions of multiculturalism. Of course, it also needs to be considered separately what kind of experience, thought and feeling the foreign students studying in a city of Turkey will return to their countries with, and what kind of bridge they will build between Turkey and their countries.

Undoubtedly, not only at the student level but also at the level of faculty members and relations with other universities, this internationalization reaches a serious level with each passing day. Turkey has become a country that produces serious value in the field of education as well and is able to market it to the world.

With its universities numbering 210 and a total of nearly eight million university students, Turkey has pulled ahead not only of where it was 18 years ago but also of the whole world. There is no doubt that the rate of universitization is the most important way of providing the human capital that will shape the world of the future. Both universitization and the internationalization of universities constitute one of Turkey's most important sources of strength.

Truly, we are beginning to see the results coming from this source of strength in the successes, breakthroughs and launches that Turkey has recently put forth in every field. We will see more, because a serious accumulation has now formed in this area that has begun to overflow.