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The Changing Patterns of the Higher Education Systems in Europe and the Future Tasks of Higher Education Research prominently those affecting the patterns of the higher education systems, changed the higher education system less than expected. It was not possible to establish the extent to which the “mixed performance” of reform efforts was due to wrong “theories of the actors” about the consequences of such reforms, to problems typical for implementation processes or to changes in the socio-political context. • In addition, the policy of establishing a second higher education was “woefully unsub stantiated” (Neave 2006, p. 246) as far as the underlying assumptions of youth educa tional choices, competences and job prospects were concerned. The second type of higher education neither ‘served to deflect the bulk of rising student demand away from the universities’ nor was a consistent alternative to the universities in terms of a clearly distinct level or student profile of those opting for the institution, clearly distinct curricular profile and a clearly distinct labour segment it served. Rather there was so much overlap of the educational functions of the two types that a clear superiority of other patterns of higher education systems did not become visible. • Moreover, the second sector of the higher education system did not turn out to be a stable institutional unit. Though officially often defined as “different, but equal”, the sector tended to be viewed as the “less noble” one, and the managers and academics of the sector favoured strategies to become more similar to the universities. Such a phenomenon of “academic drift” (Burgess 1972, Neave 1989) was already analyzed a long time ago in more steeply stratified systems than the European ones, for example in the US (Riesman 1958), but in the case of the two-types systems, we constantly noted efforts of “collective mobility” of the second type of higher education and thus an endemic instability of the whole pattern of the higher education system. Fourth, we noted already a gradual change of the regulatory philosophies in various European countries. In countries, where government had played a strong coordination and supervisory role, it moved towards stronger target-setting, less detailed supervision and evaluation both as an instrument of improvement and feedback for political priority decisions. And in Britain, where government had pursued a less interventionist policy in the past than in most other European countries, a similar policy of evaluation-informed priority setting emerged. Thus, individual institutions were led by the changing socio-political environment to compete for research funds and students and thereby to underscore their distinctiveness or to imitate the more successful ones. “Vertical” differences between individual universities, mostly subdivided according to disciplines, became the focus of attention. This was most obvious in Britain. The decision in the mid-1980s to introduce Research Assessment Exercises and to fund research at universities more specifically than before according their research performance created ample opportunities to establish or reinforce “league tables” of universities. Also, the presentation of results of regular graduate surveys in the form of “league tables” attracted public attention. But also in a country, where “vertical differences” between universities tended to be substantially smaller than in the UK, i.e. Germany, heated debates emerged in the late 1970s and persist up to the present about the extent to which the higher education system is vertically stratified. Available information shows that a certain degree of vertical differences already existed for a long time, but the differences remained small in international comparison, as far as graduate careers’ and acquisition of research grants are concerned (see Neusel and Teichler 1986; Teichler 2005). But the public debate hardly was infl uenced by evidence. Rather, a public myth emerged that the quality differences between universities had dramatically increased since the 1970s; and biased presentations of data often put forward in order to support the argument of a highly stratified system. Last but not least, the public debate did not show any sympathy for vertical diversity as a means to serve different tasks with different profiles and levels, but rather to blame the less successful universities. In analysing the debates about the extent to which universities in the various European countries were differed vertically and what degree of vertical differences was desirable, we certainly noticed that the public discourse in the 1980s and 1990s predominantly perceived an increase of vertical diversity and considered such an increase as desirable. Only by comparing realities and debates in Europe with realities and debates in countries with more steeply “hierarchical” or “stratified” systems, such the US and Japan, we notice that clearly less steep vertical differences were observed and viewed as desirable. 3.4 Global Competition for Work Class Status or an Open European Higher Education Area: The Third Generation of European Approaches In the 1990s, a third generation of approaches in Europe to the issue of institutional variety among higher education institutions began to emerge. Interestingly 90 | HELF Theme Report
enough, the descriptions of higher education in this new area are more homogeneous as regards the factors relevant for the institutional development of higher education systems than the actual institutional patterns themselves. Altogether, there seems to be consensus among experts that a broader range of underlying forces has to be taken into consideration in order to explain changes of the institutional patterns. Second, many of the relevant factors might be called external factors to the higher education system. We notice a further growth of student enrolment. Entry rates in tertiary education increased on average among European member states of the OECD for which data for a time series are available, from about 40 % in the early 1990s to more than 60 % in 2003 (see OECD 1993, 2005). This certainly again, as in the previous decades, reinforced the issue of how much the expansion as such calls for increased diversity given the talents, aspirations and job prospects of graduates, and how compatible needs are for teaching and for research under conditions of increasing pressures for financial efficiency. Actually, however, as it was pointed out by experts analyzing this theme at a European work shop in the framework of the Unesco Forum on Higher Education, Research and Knowledge, five factors were paid more attention than the expansion both in discourses among higher edu cation researchers and in public debates about pressures for a restructuring of the institutional patterns of the higher education system (see Bleiklie 2005; Guri-Rosenblit and Sebkova 2006; Teichler 2006): • growing international cooperation and mobility; • globalisation; • new steering and management systems; • moves towards a knowledge society and • new media. International cooperation and mobility: Student mobility, staff mobility and cooperation among scholars and institutions as well as knowledge transfer across borders increased in Europe gradually over the years. But in the 1990s, we noted more than a gradual change. • Promotion schemes for intra-European mobility and cooperation, among them most visibly the ERASMUS programme for temporary student mobility were so successful that study abroad was not viewed anymore as an exotic choice, but as one of the normal options. Moreover, institutions of higher education began to consider their international activities as a key issue of their institutional strategies. International activities were reflected as regards their consequences for the institution as a whole, and overall institutional policies now were always assessed and formed with respect to their implication for the international role of the institution (see Huisman and van der Wende 2005). • Ministers in charge of higher education from most European countries agreed to establish a convergent system of study programmes and degrees in Europe. The establishment of a staged system of study programmes and degrees in the framework of the so-called Bologna Process has far-reaching implications for the institutional pat terns of the higher education system. First, a system of stages of study programmes rather than one major type of programme within each institution is bound to increase intra-institutional diversity and to create an increasing overlap between the functions of the different types of higher education institutions existing in a substantial number of European countries. Second, the new structure was advocated in order to enhance the attractiveness of higher education in (continental) European countries for students from other parts of the world and to facilitate the mobility of students within Europe. Whereas the former aim might only call for improved transparency but seems to be neutral as far as the extent of diversity is concerned, the latter aim implies that quality differences between higher education systems have to be kept within bounds (see for example Amaral 2001; Bleiklie 2001; Rakic 2001; Neave 2002; van der Wende 2001; Fejes 2006). This is obvious, because mobility within European countries can be facilitated through convergent structures only if trust is justified that the quality of teaching and learning and the quality of the substance of curricula are similar at the same stage of study programmes among most institutions of higher education in Europe. Globalisation: In recent years, the term “globalisation” surpassed the term “internationalisa tion” in the frequency employed in economically advanced countries to characterise cross-national changes of both contexts of higher education and higher education systems them selves (see Enders and Fulton 2002; Huisman and van der Wende 2004). The term globalisa tion suggests that increasing border-crossing activities in higher education are linked to a blurring of borders, while internationalisation might be based on the assumption that national systems continue to play a prominent role in the process of increasing bordercrossing activities. Moreover, the term globalisation is used in this context to underscore that higher education is increasingly affected by worldwide economic developments which weaken national regulation, put a stronger emphasis on market mechanisms in most HELF Theme Report | 91
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FORWARD LOOK Higher Education Looki
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Contents Higher Education Looking F
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The Changing Patterns of the Higher
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Higher Education and Knowledge Soci
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Higher Education and the Achievemen
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