摘要：The new millennium confronts the Romanian higher education with a multitude of problems and very few solutions. Therefore,it is imperative to invest in innovation and adopt an optimistic attitude in order to see what lies ahead not so much as a threat generated by these problems,but as the challenges of a new millennium. The first challenges already became apparent in the last decade of the previous century in the form of massification,globalisation,the transition to a knowledge-based society,and the creation of a European Higher Education Area.The massification of education has been caused by the reassessment of the social function of higher education and the transition from elite education to mass education. Thus,the number of students has increased substantially,study programmes have been diversified, and educational structures now aim to converge as a result of the globalisation phenomenon. According to specialists,9 the most important effects of globalisation on higher education are: the development of university networks which can negotiate the market segment on which strategic competitiveness can be asserted,preserving however the national identity of the respective institutions;the development of hybrid universities which combine processes of knowledge generation and transfer with structures involving firms and corporations which activate in the same field;the emergence of virtual universities organised as corporate structures;the emergence of global universities,based on the model of IBM and Microsoft Corporation.
