From Expert Discourse to Strategic Architecture in Higher Education: A Longitudinal Topic Modeling Approach

The continuous transformation of higher education, shaped by internationalization, digitalization, labor market dynamics, and increasing institutional competitiveness, has intensified the need for strategic adaptation within universities. The purpose of this study is to identify the dominant strategic priorities for the development of Romanian universities based on the recommendations formulated by specialists from the national higher education system between 2014 and 2025. The research focuses on two main questions: which strategic themes were considered the most relevant over time and how these priorities varied across the main development regions of Romania. A text mining approach was applied using Orange Data Mining on a final corpus of 944 validated responses, while topic modeling was performed through the Negative Matrix Factorization algorithm to identify the dominant thematic structures. The analysis was further supported by temporal and territorial comparisons of the extracted themes. The results revealed ten major strategic topics, among which internationalization, interdisciplinary projects, partnerships between universities, teaching quality, and academic staff development emerged as the most prominent directions. Important variations were also identified across years and development regions, reflecting the influence of institutional and socio-economic contexts on university development priorities. The findings provide useful implications for university managers and decision-makers by supporting the design of development strategies adapted to both institutional needs and regional specificities.