Mezei István: Urban development in Slovakia (Pécs-Somorja, 2010)
4. Towns in Slovakia after 1993
Education as a new factor of urban development 4. 5 Education as a new factor of urban development In recent years the most obvious sign of adjustment to the new conditions was if a town or city offered higher education opportunities. In the party-state era there were two towns, Bratislava and Košice, which had independent higher educational institutions that trained students for several professions. Besides these, there were two in Nitra (pedagogy and agricultural engineering) and one faculty (of forestry) in Zvolen, but after 1990 new universities were established in several towns. All in all, there are 20 higher educational institutions in Slovakia: apart from the two above mentioned cities, they are located in Banská Bystrica, Nitra, Prešov, Ružomberok, Trnava, Trenčín, Komárno, Zvolen and Žilina. The nine private universities have the most peculiar list of settlement names, because besides the big cities, like Bratislava, Prešov and Trenčín, there are small towns, like Skalica and Sládkovičovo, which have such institutions. The appearance of private universities does not mean sharp competition with state institutions, because they only make up 10.3% of all the departments, 2.6% of full-time students and 6.3% of lecturers. The 22.8% proportion of part-time students indicates that private universities have discovered and are trying to meet the special needs of people who are employed. Table 35 shows that, although the outstanding role of Bratislava is obvious, higher education in Slovakia is not really concentrated in one town. Only 25.9% of all the departments, 34.9% of all full-time students and 37.9% of lecturers can be found in Bratislava. The higher rate of lecturers indicates the outstanding importance of Bratislava in education and research. The high rate of foreign students (43.8%) is a sign of the good reputation of the universities in the city. 119
