Download Slide 1

Bologna, mobility and the
marketisation of higher
education
Jim Coleman, The Open University, UK
Background
• Bologna Process launched 2009: academic and political
aims for 29 members
• Currently 46 members
• Berlin communiqué 2003 added the Lisbon agenda ‘for
the EU to become the most competitive and dynamic
knowledge-based economy in the world’
10th Anniversary Leuven Communiqué
• ‘The Bologna Process is leading to greater compatibility
and comparability of the systems of higher education
and is making it easier for learners to be mobile and for
institutions to attract students and scholars from other
continents.’
• Quality assurance
• Qualifications frameworks based on learning outcomes
and workload
• Objectives still valid but ‘not completely achieved’
Problem?
• Signed by 46 European countries, the Bologna process calls on
countries to integrate their education systems and implement a
credit transfer system by 2010. Continental universities have had
to replace their own degree systems with the bachelor's and
master's degrees of the Anglo-Saxon world.
• While supporters say this will increase the competitiveness of
European universities and increase mobility for European
students, the student strikers argue that the changes have made
study programs inflexible and have reduced universities to
factories producing workers for the economy.
(Deutsche Welle online 17/06/09)
Problem?
• However, depending on how the reforms are implemented, there
can be unintended consequences. National governments seeking
to have world-class universities have brought competitive
pressure into the process.
• "Rankings and other initiatives to create world-class universities
are widespread and act as an intervening factor into the trust and
cooperation agenda which underlies the Bologna reforms,"
Professor Barbara Kehm said.
• "Ultimately," she added, "you can't compete with the outside and
think you can keep it out of the inside.“
(Deutsche Welle online 17/06/09)
Problem?
• Das humanistische Ideal einer zur kritischen Reflexion
befähigenden, gemeinwohlorientierten Bildung wird
zurückgedrängt. Stattdessen wird Bildung den Bedürfnissen des
Marktes angepasst und damit selbst mehr und mehr zur Ware.
Global sind es die GATS-Vertäge, in Europa der BolognaProzess, die den Kern solcher Reformen bilden. (Bildingsstreik
leaflet June 2009 )
• Demands included:
• Abschaffung von Bachelor/Master in der derzeitigen Form
• die Abkehr vom Bachelor als Regelabschluss!
• die Einheit von Forschung und Lehre statt der Exzellenzinitiative!
Problem?
• Correlation between national educational level and
economic prosperity
• Hence national expansion of higher education
• Cannot be funded from general public taxation, so
higher private input (privatisations, fees, loans)
• International (i.e. non-EU) students an essential source
of income
• Hence Englishisation (Campus France, Wächter &
Maiworm 2008) and Bologna as recruitment tools
• Each country creating a hierarchy of universities with an
élite to compete globally
Mobility
• Aim: ‘In 2020, at least 20% of those graduating in the
European Higher Education Area should have had a
study or training period abroad’ (Leuven communiqué
§18)
• Aim: ‘Mobility should also lead to a more balanced flow
of incoming and outgoing students’ (Leuven
communiqué §19)
• Reality: ERASMUS numbers stagnating in established
EU member states; Bachelor too tight to allow study
abroad (or earning while studying); unbalanced flows
Global ambitions
• In the future, the Bologna Process will be co-chaired by
the country holding the EU presidency and a non-EU
country. (Leuven communiqué §24)
• The BFUG [Bologna Follow-up Group] is asked … to set
up a network … for better information on and promotion
of the Bologna Process outside the EHEA . (Leuven
communiqué §26)
Global ambitions
• ‘The core features of the Bologna Process have sufficient
momentum to become the dominant global higher education
model within the next two decades’
(Adelman 2008: v)
• ‘The European Credit Transfer System that developed with the
ERASMUS program after 1988, and more recently the Bologna
process, has prompted educators throughout Europe to examine
their curricula against those of other countries and to develop
common outcomes for students. US educators, observing the
Bologna process, have begun to consider how the United States
might be better integrated with this international movement’.
(Steinberg 2008: 8-9)
Responses?
• UK no need to change, dominates Bologna model,
dominates Bologna quality assurance (learning
outcomes…), ‘interprets’ ECTS grades…
• Competition for international students, esp. Masters
• Mass Education
– From compensation to investment in human capital
– C20 cost-free human right, C21 individual investment
‘choice’ – wider political issue
– Evolving household budgets
I told you so
• Coleman 2003, 2005, 2006: 3-4
• Coleman, J. A. (2003). A Bolognai Folyamat és az európai
nyelvtanárképzés jövöje (The Bologna Process and the Future of
European Language Teacher Training), Modern Nyelvoktatás
(Modern Language Teaching), IX (4): 3-12.
• Coleman, J. A. (2005). New contexts for university languages: the
Bologna Process, globalisation and employability, Proceedings of
Navigating the new landscape for languages conference (SOAS,
London, June 2004), online at
http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/paper.aspx?resourceid=2255
• Coleman, J. A. (2006). English-medium teaching in European
higher education, Language Teaching, 39, 1: 1-14.