Learning from Bologna

The Bologna Process is a massive project that attempts to create a European Higher Education Area. Started in 1999, it involves 46 European countries, and affects 4000 institutions of higher learning. Named after the city that houses the oldest university (seal below) in Europe, Bologna attempts to provide common reference points allowing European institutions to “recognize” each other’s credentials and provide greater mobility for their students and subsequent skilled workforce. If successful (some might say when), Bologna could propel Europe to the forefront of competitiveness, creativity, innovation, and make the region an economic force to be reckoned with.

Why am I writing about Bologna? I’ve personally experienced education systems in several countries as a student. I’ve also worked as a professor and a higher education administrator on two different continents with markedly different systems. I regularly follow world higher education news, and I had been loosely following the Bologna process through news articles over the years. With the end of the semester, I now had time to delve into Clifford Adelman’s 220+ page report – The Bologna Process: Relearning Higher Education in the Age of Convergence. I’d previously read shorter pieces from Adelman on assessment. He writes clearly and provides supporting data and detailed analysis. I knew I would learn from his report.

In his report, Adelman goes into detail explaining how Qualification Frameworks work, with national-level examples from Britain, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands. He also provides examples of disciplinary or field-specific qualification frameworks (“Tuning” in the jargon), including chemistry! Adelman discusses the challenges of reaching consensus across very different national systems, each having their own language and terminology. Assessment is one of Adelman’s specialties; I’m not going to go into great detail other than saying that reading Adelman made me appreciate the arguments made for constructing learning outcomes and assessing them. Somehow when an administrator at my own institution talks about assessment, it just sounds like a pain-in-the-ass checkbox task for the purpose of ass-covering. Adelman takes the ass out of Assessment, if you’ll pardon my punny and colorful language. It’s still a lot of work but it sounds more worthwhile given his strong arguments for doing the work and doing it right.

Instead, I will highlight three things that the report made me think about. The first is the challenge of putting together the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS). I’d recently worked on a revised credit hour policy at my home institution, where I made arguments supporting using credit-hours as a measurement of student workload (rather than faculty contact hours). Five years ago, while helping start a new international liberal arts college, I helped to translate and merge two different systems, again based on student workload arguments. I even wrote a white paper for this process, whimsically titled “Modular Credits and Teaching Loads and Workloads, Oh My!” (think Lions Tigers Bears in Wizard of Oz). I didn’t re-read my report but the boldfaced last line reads: “No system is perfectly equitable. Byzantine bean-counting should be AVOIDED!”

I hadn’t read Adelman’s 2009 report back then, although I should have. Here’s what he says in a section suggesting what the U.S. could learn from ECTS. These two paragraphs will also give you a sense of his sharp and clear writing!

The U.S. credit currency, based principally on faculty contact hours (along with varying assumptions about student study-time per faculty contact hour), is a metric designed for funding and resource allocation, not as a proxy for learning. Its engine lies in the office of the Vice President for Finance, not the office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs. The student is incidental. Even in the matter of time, the same faculty load serves considerable differences in student work load. Something is wrong here. If we care about accountability for student learning, perhaps we need a redesign. Perhaps the Bologna experience might help us.

Before one redesigns a credit system, one needs some definitions, principles, and guidelines. The mechanical implementation of ECTS doesn’t really do it. Credit should define levels of student work (time volume and intellectual demand) that render courses in different disciplines comparable. In a way, the U.S. system tries to do that now by giving an extra credit for science labs or language labs or by heavier credit weighting of externships. But we do so in a rather arbitrary fashion, and wind up awarding the same number of credits for course work of widely varying intellectual demand. We give three credits for a course in Econometrics and three for Introduction to Sports, and brush such dissonances under the rug. This observation is not new.

The second thing I will highlight is Adelman’s suggestion that we pay attention to the rising importance of the Masters degree in Europe. A lot can be said about the evolution of different Masters degrees in different areas in different countries, but I’m not going to delve into the details. On previous occasions, I opposed expanding our department offerings beyond the undergraduate degree. (At my college, three departments with small Masters programs.) My argument, made with my department colleagues in unison, was that we should focus our energy and resources on undergraduates – and I think we do a fantastic job at it. Arguments I’ve heard from administration seemed to be more about how to increase revenue streams to the university. Being in chemistry, I think we’d be more expensive to run, not to mention we’d stretch ourselves more thinly. Adelman however makes a global mobility and expertise argument for Masters programs – it’s the first time I’ve felt open to the possibility.

The third interesting nugget from Adelman’s report is a proposal to formalize short-cycle degrees or certificates at an institution that normally offers bachelor’s (and higher) degrees. For example, a student could receive a minor (if they have taken the requisite courses) at a certain point in their education before they receive a major a year or more down the road. The U.S. split between community colleges offering associate degrees and four-year institutions offering bachelor degrees might not be a model that serves today’s students well in the long run. Short-cycle degree formalization might be the easiest thing to accomplish piecemeal, although piecemeal might not be the best idea. The different facets of Bologna are “tightly intertwined” and therefore challenging to treat piecemeal, according to Adelman.

Bologna is comprehensive in vision and scope, not just for institutions, but for the students they serve. That also makes it a difficult long-haul process. Adelman writes that “our European colleagues have sought to do right by the student by reinvigorating the most basic and common role of institutions of higher education in every society and economy on this globe: the distribution of knowledge and development of skills to apply that knowledge.” While some institutions may also be involved in generating new knowledge (e.g. through research/scholarship) and preserving knowledge (through archives), all are involved in knowledge distribution and application. This means, according to Adelman, that “content counts”. Knowledge is very important. You can’t teach generic ‘critical thinking’ skills, particularly the higher order ones on Bloom’s Taxonomy, without a good deal of content knowledge.

Where do we go from here? I don’t know. Adelman and others have argued that importing or even adapting Bologna shouldn’t necessarily be the goal. The U.S. should be paying attention and learning from our European colleagues. Other global blocs are doing this, for example, the African Union and ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations). Unlike the language of standardization used in Bologna (and standardization does not mean clone copies but rather common standards), Africa and Southeast Asia use the language of harmonization. The U.S. is a large country, long esteemed for being the top tertiary education destination in the world. But the world is changing. By being unattentive to globalization, or becoming increasingly isolationist, could lead to a continued erosion of U.S. eminence. Then again, it’s hard to predict the future.