In 1999, the education ministers from 29 European nations gathered in the city that houses the oldest of all the continent’s universities—Bologna, Italy. The purpose of the meeting was to come up with a framework for improving the efficiency of higher education, not only within the borders of each country, but across the continent.
For about the last five years, there has been a gradually increasing level of discussion in the U.S. about what has come to be called The Bologna Process (henceforth, just Bologna). Not until recently, however, has a book given Americans a thorough examination of Bologna. Professor Paul Gaston of Kent State has now written such a book, The Challenge of Bologna. His subtitle (“What United States Higher Education Has to Learn From Europe, and Why It Matters That We Learn It”) makes it clear that he thinks Bologna is very important.
Knowing little about the details of Bologna, I was eager to find out if indeed it is a “challenge” to the U.S. that we must rise to meet.
And now that I’ve read the book, not only do I fail to share Professor Gaston’s high opinion of Bologna, but I’m convinced that it’s far more show than substance. The whole “process” is a top-down reform initiative that gives officials an excuse to hold a lot of meetings, issue press reports and papers, create new committees and study groups, and in general, appear busy.
Gaston and other Bologna devotees will probably respond that my take is too cynical, but experience teaches us that top-down, centrally-directed initiatives to improve education (or anything else) are usually more about talk than results. Read the book: Page after page is about process and almost nothing pertains to real educational results.
Exactly what is Bologna supposed to accomplish?
Gaston identifies six broad “action lines.” (Warning: bureaucratic jargon coming. You might want to get a cup of coffee.)
- Creation of easily comparable degrees.
- Organization of higher education into two cycles: undergraduate and graduate.
- Management of education credentials through a recognized system of credits.
- Encouragement of educational mobility through cross-border opportunities for study and teaching.
- Development of a stronger commitment to quality assurance.
- Promotion of “European dimensions” of higher education, especially through curricular development, cooperation among institutions, and integrated programs of study.
With the exception of the part about quality, all of those goals seem terribly wonkish. Even the quality point is fuzzy; you could, after all, spend a lot of time developing that “commitment to quality assurance” without making any improvements in how well students learn their chemistry, for example. Here’s what Gaston writes about one of the follow-up meetings to Bologna (held in Berlin in 2003) regarding improving educational quality: “[T]he ministers instructed the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education to work with other sources of quality assurance expertise to foster a consensus on institution-based quality assurance standards and procedures based on a system of peer review.”
See what I mean?
To Gaston’s credit, he doesn’t ignore skeptics entirely. He mentions that after the 2007 meeting in London, a student group released a report entitled “Bologna With Student Eyes” stating that (in Gaston’s words), “accomplishments have been overstated in the official reports, that momentum has slowed, that awareness of Bologna remains for the most part limited to government and the academy….”
That is precisely what one should expect of top-down, politically-driven “reform” movements. They’re mainly about the appearance of doing something.
Just as many Americans greatly overestimate the importance of higher education for our economic success, so do the Europeans involved with Bologna. Gaston quotes a 2009 pertinent document asserting that universities are “motors for economic recovery.” In fact, one of the grand notions behind the whole Process is that with “reform” of its higher education, Europe will gain a big advantage enabling it to surpass the United States economically.
While there is much that can and should be done to raise the efficiency of higher education (here and in Europe), it’s sheer folly to think that those marginal gains will have a perceptible effect on the economy’s productivity and progress. Gaston isn’t an economist and never reflects on the feebleness of the supposed connection between higher education and economic growth.
Most of the European economies are heavily regulated, heavily taxed, egalitarian welfare states that deter investment and entrepreneurship. (The United States is marginally to significantly better than most European nations with regard to the drag that government imposes on economic efficiency and progress.) Whatever slight improvements Bologna might make in its goals for higher education, they cannot even begin to offset the damage done by government policy elsewhere.
Think of it this way. A farmer has an old, gaunt horse struggling to pull an overloaded wagon uphill. The poor beast is making little progress, so the farmer halts and gives the horse a carrot to eat. The rest and the carrot will help a tiny bit, but the fundamentals are still the same; it’s wishful thinking to believe that the horse will now be able to trot along briskly. Similarly, putting more students through college, improving the degree/credentialing system, improving quality assurance, mobility and so forth won’t miraculously enable European nations to overcome the huge obstacles most of them have put in the way of economic progress.
Ditto for the United States.
As I noted earlier, Gaston regards Bologna as a serious challenge for the U.S. He wants to see a reform movement begin here, a movement that will enable us to “regain leadership.”
Just to cite one area where he wants to see improvement is “national documentation of academic accomplishment.” But is the lack of such a system really a problem? In every field where academic accomplishment truly matters, prospective employers or other educational institutions are easily able to identify those students who have “the right stuff.” Engineering firms can tell which applicants have the background to make good engineers; medical schools can tell which applicants show the capacity to master their material.
Why don’t we have a national system for documenting academic accomplishment in every field? The answer is because academic accomplishment rarely matters. College credentials are seldom important for anything except a rough screening mechanism that enables employers or schools to cast aside those who don’t have them. Academic accomplishment doesn’t really matter to, e.g., the rental car company that only wants people with college degrees working its counters.
There isn’t any failure in the market for information about student knowledge and capabilities where knowledge and capabilities are important.
We don’t need a Bologna-type higher ed reform process. Nor do we need the reform process that Gaston envisions, one that isn’t driven by government, but rather by the academy. Where changes make sense—where they don’t just look good, but actually produce benefits in excess of costs—they’ll come from the bottom up. If an industry or even a single firm needs workers with better education in some respect, it can and will take the steps necessary to achieve that objective.
Don’t expect educational central planning (Bologna, the Spellings Commission, No Child Left Behind, etc.) to accomplish much. Real improvements come from the bottom up.