On a macro level, higher education within the Eastern bloc had lofty socialist goals that were undermined by both the inability of the state to fully fund higher education and the need to subordinate higher education to politics. When the Soviets occupied Eastern Europe, they instituted through their satellite state governments a reform of higher education that would reorientated both admissions and curriculum along Stalinist lines. This meant that admissions favored those with a proletarian or agricultural background and discriminated against the children of bourgeois professionals that did not flee the advancing Red Army.

The results of this admissions policy was rather mixed; in predominately agricultural states like Hungary and the Slovak half of Czechoslovakia, the growth of urban areas due to rural migration led to a massive increase of students. In places like East Germany, Poland, and the Czech lands, these admissions policies led to localized purging of students who possessed the wrong socioeconomic background. This had the inadvertent effect of both weakening the university as an institution while simultaneously politicizing higher education. The satellite states also instituted policies for continuing higher education for workers and technical training. The problem was that these programs were chronically underfunded and few workers availed themselves of them. Similarly, the full employment of the planned economy (and the inability of full employment to meet daily needs) gave little incentive for the children of the growing working class to advance their education.

One significant stumbling bloc in the expansion of higher education was the professorate. Older scholarship emphasized that professors often escaped the rigid ideological demands to teach their disciplines along Marxist-Leninist precepts by instead focusing upon esoteric subjects that were less easily politicized. East German historical research into the Peasants' War of the sixteenth century was an example of highly original research that would be far less likely to draw the negative attention of the state.

Recent studies of higher education have qualified this interpretation of professorial-state relations and emphasized that many university professors remained indifferent to directives to teach Marxist-Leninist and the esoteric research was more in keeping with traditional pedagogy of prewar higher education. By the 1960s, many Eastern Bloc universities had an aging old guard and a number of newer faculty that was more congruent with socialist ideology, but this presented the prospective student with two unpalatable alternatives.

On a micro-level, the Czech half of Czechoslovakia was a special case in Eastern bloc higher education. Student activism in the immediate postwar period was very sharp and Communist ideology made great inroads among the student body. As John Connelly notes, Czech students were both increasingly idealistic and radical. But the inability of the Czechoslovakian state to provide the infrastructural investment in higher education turned many of these students into reformers. Students were highly visible within the 1968 Prague Spring and the resulting crackdown led to much tighter controls being instituted upon the Czech university system. Universities lost all vestiges of autonomy and official student organizations had to go through the various Communist Party youth organs. The political vetting of student applicants (such as a father's membership in the Communist Party) was much higher than in contemporaneous Eastern bloc states. Such clamping down had a negative effect upon both enrollment growth and student disenchantment with the state.

Sources

Connelly, John. Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech and Polish Higher Education, 1945-1956. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Hanley, Eric. "Centrally Administered Mobility Reconsidered: The Political Dimension of Educational Stratification in State-Socialist Czechoslovakia". Sociology of Education. 74, no. 1 (2001): 25-43.

Pabian, Petr, Lucie Hundlova, and Karla Provazkova. "The Czech Republic between Studentocracy, Academic Oligarchy and Managerialism: Are Students Powerful or Powerless?" Tertiary Education and Management. 17, no. 3 (2011): 191-203.

Tsvetkova, Natalia. "Making a New and Pliable Professor: American and Soviet Transformations in German Universities, 1945–1990." Minerva 52, no. 2 (2014): 161-185.