We did it! After tough negotiations, student representatives from across Europe walked away from the small Belgian city of with Leuven with a deep sense of satisfaction after Ministers from the 46 Bologna countries committed themselves to a much more student-focused future for the Process.
Following strong criticism of the lack of attention paid to the social dimension of Bologna in recent times, Europe’s education ministers agreed to set national targets for widening participation in Higher Education. At the Leuven and Lovain-la-Neuve ministerial meeting this week, the ministers promised to develop data collection to facilitate the monitoring of progress on the social dimension and mobility, marking a major step forward in ensuring the delivery of these crucial action lines.
Another student victory came in the form of an explicit target for mobility across the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). All 46 Bologna countries will now be working towards achieving a target of 20% balanced mobility by 2020. This is a huge victory for ESU, which originally conceived such a target and has been fighting for it consistently over the last two years. Such a target and a focus on significantly increasing the level of student mobility is essential for ensuring that the EHEA takes shape in much more than name over the next decade and it will be an objective easy to measure how other Bologna action lines have progressed. If mobility number go up, it means that students have enough financial support (social dimension), that recognition is no longer feared and that students feel a mobile study period is academically meaningful (quality assurance).
Some other ministerial decisions, however, were less enlightened from the student point of view. The inclusion of ‘transparency tools’ for the first time in the communiqué raises the much-feared prospect that university rankings could become a future feature of the Process, diverting much-needed attention away from quality assurance and creating a dangerous reputation race among higher education institutions. However, the respective paragraph also reaffirms that quality assurance will remain the primary focus of the Bologna countries, in an attempt to not fall into the danger of higher education institutions focusing on narrow external indicators, rather than comprehensive criteria that include students’ priorities.
The need for public financing was underlined several places, reflecting the fact that investment in education has become the unifying demand of higher education ministers, institutions, students and staff. Inevitably, however, given the current economic crisis, ministers also chose to make a commitment to ‘diversifying’ sources of finance for higher education, taking into account private sources, rather than delivering a guaranteed minimum of public funding in recognition of education’s role as a public good in society.
The litmus test will now be whether actions follow words in the coming years and the encouraging signs coming out of Leuven this week are matched by concrete actions across the European continent.
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