The Higher Education Evidence Based Policy Making: a necessary premise for progress in Romania project is being implemented by the Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding (UEFISCDI) in the timeframe February 2012 – February 2014, being co-financed by the European Social Fund through the Operational Programme “Administrative Capacity Development”.

The project aims to increase the capacity of public administration for evidence-based policy making in the field of higher education, while focusing on good practices at international level and impact assessment.

The project will put forward a new philosophy of data collection and interpretation for the Romanian higher education. The specialists involved in the project will first identify the specific data types required to substantiate public policies and then elaborate the methodologies for data collection. Another element of novelty is the design of an online platform with relevant data gathered from the Romanian universities, structured on the basis of well-defined indicators. Once put into place, this platform will constitute an important resource for public policies formulation. All the envisaged outcomes of the project are components of a large scale effort designed to develop the Strategic Information System for Higher Education.

With the contribution of the national and international experts, the project will also generate a number ofstudies on the existing higher education public policies and internal quality management systems, in terms of performance and fitness for purpose. The methodological framework for a multi-dimensional classification of higher education programmes will be developed within the project. Additionally, the experts will seek ways for a successful Romanian implementation of the U-Map project, which envisages multi-dimensional university rankings, as well as their influence on higher education funding. All these deliverables, together with Bologna Process related information, will be made available to the public on a dynamic WEB 2.0. platform.

Furthermore, the project aims to identify a group of resource persons involved in the higher education policy making process. In order to achieve this objective, the national and international expertize in elaboration, monitoring and evaluation of public policies will serve as a starting point. Training sessions on the data collection and statistical interpretation will be organized, thus ensuring the quality of the data collected and their optimum use throughout the decision making process, at strategic and operational level.

The public will be provided access to structured information, various national and international documents by means of an online library on higher education public policies, also developed within the project. This deliverable represents follow-up on the Romanian initiative to create a Bologna Process online database, as part of the Bologna Secretariat responsibilities (2010 – 2012).

A semantic analysis of public policies documents, promotion of equity and sustainable developmentconstitute other envisaged deliverables of the “Higher Education Evidence Based Policy Making: a necessary premise for progress in Romania” project.