Educating the Children of Communism

IT'S the last place you'd expect to find a prestigious American liberal-arts college. The drab provincial town is nestled on the Macedonian border 100 kilometers (62 miles) south of Sofia. The only outsiders previously seen in Blagoevgrad were party officials visiting on business and truck-drivers passing through on their way to Greece.

Now hundreds of Bulgaria's brightest students descend on the city each fall to resume their studies at the American University in Bulgaria (AUBG), a two-year-old institution that is already one of the most prestigious and competitive in the country. The university continues to receive more than twice as many applications as it has places available. This year's entering class had impressive credentials: top-notch grades, English fluency, and an average combined Scholastic Aptitude Test score of 1231 - far above American averages.

``These students will be the future leaders of Bulgaria,'' says Brad Fujimoto, project manager for the United States Agency for International Development. ``They're an incredible, intelligent, top-notch group - probably the best in this country.''

The students come from across Eastern Europe, attracted by the prospect of earning a US degree and a liberal-arts education unavailable at the region's state universities. One in 10 comes from outside Bulgaria.

``If I'd entered an economics university in Albania, I would have studied only economics, says Oltiana Mara, a second-year student from Tirana. ``Here I'm really pleased because I can study something from arts, something from history, while earning my degree.''

``This liberal-arts education gives you a broad educational background and an international perspective I couldn't have gotten at a Bulgarian university,'' says Svetoslav Gatchev, a third-year business major.

``The enthusiasm of the first class was more than great,'' says Deyan Vassilev, the student president. ``We had the highest of high expectations and hoped to find a university like Harvard or Oxford here in Blagoevgrad.''

By most accounts, Bulgaria's rigid Soviet-style university system has been slow to respond to the dramatic social and economic changes since 1990. As elsewhere in the region, it continues to produce large numbers of technicians, agronomists, and engineers to work in now-bankrupt state industries and cooperative farms, according to a report by UNESCO's Bucharest-based European Center for Higher Education. Meanwhile there's a regionwide shortage of skilled labor in business management and sales, computer science, law, and journalism.

Administrators hope AUBG can help fill these gaps. ``We have no interest in competing in areas where Bulgarian universities do well,'' says Lyndell Grey, AUBG vice president. ``We're filling a hole. It's no accident that we're a liberal-arts institution concentrating in humanities, social sciences, and journalism.''

Being taught to think about issues rather than learning by rote memorization is new to most students.

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