Let’s stirr the room!
Since next february a congress on careers in life sciences is taking place, we’ll have to discuss about the Bologna process, which is, by all means, the leading actor in the transformation of the european higher education arena.
The pro’s, meaning, the EU, say that:
The Bologna Process aims to create a European Higher Education Area by 2010, in which students can choose from a wide and transparent range of high quality courses and benefit from smooth recognition procedures. The Bologna Declaration of June 1999 has put in motion a series of reforms needed to make European Higher Education more compatible and comparable, more competitive and more attractive for Europeans and for students and scholars from other continents. Reform was needed then and reform is still needed today if Europe is to match the performance of the best performing systems in the world, notably the United States and Asia.
http://ec.europa.eu/education/policies/educ/bologna/bologna_en.html
So, it seems, we’re just catching up to american standards. Is that the answer Europe is needing? How is that affecting your country?
Since I’m an spanish biotechnologist that switched science for reporting about science, I’ve lived -intensely-the polemic about Bologna in Spain. Many people is concerned about the economic aspects of these reform. I’ll quote from a more than democratic source, the Wikipedia:
There is much scepticism and criticism of the Bologna process from the side of academics. Thus Dr Chris Lorenz of the Free University of Amsterdam has argued that:
“the basic idea behind all educational EU-plans is economic: the basic idea is the enlargement of scale of the European systems of higher education, … in order to enhance its ‘competitiveness’ by cutting down costs. Therefore a Europe-wide standardization of the ‘values’ produced in each of the national higher educational systems is called for.” Just as the World Trade Organization and GATS propose educational reforms that would effectively erode all effective forms of democratic political control over higher education, so “it is obvious that the economic view on higher education recently developed and formulated by the EU Declarations is similar to and compatible with the view developed by the WTO and by GATS.”
So how could we improve the education, its links to the industry, and do it without something similar to the Bologna process?