Business Education
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Europe
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Cycling and the City
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Main Content
Higher Education In Europe 2010
Christened after the university city where it was conceived, the Bologna Process is a cooperation between ministries, higher education, institutions, students and staff from 46 different countries .With an original aim of creating a European Higher Education Area, it claims to facilitate the mobility of students, graduates and higher education staff, prepare students for careers and lives as active citizens in democratic societies and offer broad access to high quality higher education based on democratic principles and academic freedom. Although in theory, it looks attractive, in practice, the case is always different and we all know that the Bologna process is no exception.
The thing is, the Bologna process requires students to adjust themselves to the needs of the economy as best as possible. Instead of receiving a comprehensive social education, the Bologna process suggests that students should learn as much as possible in the shortest possible time. In many cases, the fundamental background to the process which is the standardization of qualifications seemed to threaten existing arrangements without improving them.
So for the above reasons, among others, we witnessed constant students protests through out the last few years. We saw students occupy lecture halls with their camping equipment, block off train and metros stations and carry out well orchestrated mass demonstrations. Earlier this month, students took out their placards once again at the Bologna meeting in Vienna to show Minsters who were their celebrating the initiatives' 10th birthday that they were not in favour.
So, when the Executive agency of the EU on Education, Audio-visual and culture brought out a study this month summarising Europe's higher education system since the arrival of the Bologna process, TheBeginner.eu was adamant to take a look to see what positive impact the infamous Bologna process was having. According to the European Commission, Europe's 4,000 higher education institutions make up of 19 million students and 1.5 million employees so its an important sector to look after.
According to the report, higher education in Europe is more popular than ever with student populations doubling in countries like Armenia, Lithuania, Montenegro and Romania. The only country where the student community has decreased has in Spain. Due to this increase in students, the number of higher education systems have grown too especially in countries like Italy, Malta, Slovenia and Armenia. According to the report, a large part of this growth has been in vocational and professional higher education programmes as well as private, government-recognised higher education institutions.
Questions of mobility, access, participation and funding were other issues touched mentioned in the report, proving that there are many challenges for Europe's current higher education system on top of the current economic crisis.