Students’s Visitors – Among the Unexplored Types of Local Tourism?

Universities have the capacity to attract students from a vast geographical area, thus resulting in new residences for its host city. This is a well-known effect especially for major and prestigious universities located in relatively small locations. Babeș-Bolyai University in the city of Cluj-Napoca is such an example. Using our survey data, we explore a form of local tourism left rather unexplored – the students’ visitors. Our results show that only 9.3% of these visitors spend the night at a hotel or hostel making this type of tourism little known and mostly untraceable for official tourism data. An estimated 7.5 million Euros were spent only by the BBU students’ visitors in the city of Cluj-Napoca in the year of 2015.</p

Necesitatea investigării impactului economic al instituțiilor învățământului superior în România

Universities’ economic impact and their importance to the surrounding area constitute an old and well-established discourse in the Western countries, yet almost entirely absent among Romanian universities. The paper aims at summarizing some of this international debate and its roots, presenting some methodological approaches in investigating the economic impact of a university to a certain area. Such a complex subject certainly has triggered the interest of various researchers, who have identified a series of factors that underline the imperative of investigating the subject. The severe underfunding, the lack of legislative consistency, the demographic realities and the economic crisis make the necessity of investigating the economic impact among Romanian universities even more prominent nowadays.</p

Cluj-Napoca without Students: An Estimation of The Gap in the City’s Economy

In the new context of COVID-19, the authors assess the economic gap of the absence of students from Cluj-Napoca for one month due to the pandemic quarantine and isolation. The economic gap is presented in terms of estimated expenditures that did not occur, on an average monthly basis. The estimations are based on the survey data carried among Babeș-Bolyai University students that assessed students’ expenditure for the year of 2015 in Cluj-Napoca. Our results suggest that due to the absence of the student population from Cluj-Napoca, around 33.4 million Euros is the expected amount of loss per month through spending that does not occur.</p

Finanțarea învățământului superior în România în perioada 2007-20131

The paper aims at summarizing the form and sources of financing for public universities in Romania, its specific legislation and changes that occur on national education level, such as the continuous decrease in the total number of students. University’s finances are placed in the context of the economic crisis, the period under analysis being 2007-2013. Facing a situation of acute underfunding and a lack of legislative consistency, an economic crisis can have much stronger effects in the long run. The situation of higher education in Romania is presented in the European context; some particularities of Babeș-Bolyai University’s revenues are presented on national scale.</p