By Aisha Labi

Nantes, France

A complex effort to harmonize degree systems in 47 European countries and create a common European Higher Education Area in which students and academics can move to work and study has resulted in significant changes for European higher education. But the project has also engendered deeply ambivalent feelings in many quarters. Several sessions at the annual conference of the European Association for International Education, which took place here last week, were devoted to themes related to the Bologna Process, as the effort is known, and reactions to the changes it has produced were mixed.

The Bologna Process began in 1999 when the education ministers of 29 European countries pledged to work toward the creation of the European Higher Education Area, a milestone that was officially achieved last year.

Robert Wagenaar, director of undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, is one of the coordinators of the Bologna Tuning Educational Structures in Europe project, which aligns goals among universities for student achievement in individual disciplines. At the level of individual universities, "the actual implementation of the Bologna Process has been limited," he said.

Despite that, the process has clearly set into motion changes that are affecting students and academic staffs even if, more than a decade after the process began, many of the people involved in putting it into effect are still debating such essentials as how to define and measure mobility, one of the Bologna Process's core concepts.

Fuzzy Definition of Goals

At a session devoted to discussion of whether Bologna has improved mobility and made progress toward a target of 20 percent mobility by 2020, the difficulties became evident. There is still no consensus, for example, on whether countries should count both outward and inward mobility when compiling statistics. Or on whether mobility outside of Europe should be included. Nor is there agreement about how statistics should differentiate, if at all, between study abroad for a limited duration, such as a semester, and longer-length stays, such as for entire degree programs.

Siegbert Wuttig leads a department at the German Academic Exchange Service that deals with matters related to the Bologna Process. He said that the European Union's Erasmus program for student mobility, which has been operating since 1987 and which helped inspire Bologna, has set a clear target of three million students by 2012, contrast with Bologna's ill-defined goals. The difficulty in assessing the impact of Bologna on mobility is also complicated by problems of interpretation. Where there have been increases in mobility, he said, "it is not clear if has much to do with Bologna."

The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, has taken a lead role in carrying out the Bologna Process, in which all of its 27 member states are participating. It has made the issue a priority and this month announced a new Youth on the Move project, a commission representative said at the conference. The commission will issue a communiqué in December defining its benchmarks for mobility and outlining how it will measure them, she said.

That bureaucratic approach to much of Bologna appears to have contributed to the confusion and led to much of the unhappiness with some of its elements. David Coyne, a former longtime education expert at the commission, noted in another session that there has been "very little central control of Bologna and very little independent evaluation until recently." National ministers of education were able to claim credit for the success of a historic undertaking without having such pronouncements subjected to rigorous scrutiny, he said. At each biannual ministerial meeting, there is a drive to come up with a new communiqué, even in the absence of genuine substantive progress, he said.

Hindrances to Change

Even as their ministers of education issue periodic updates of their progress and promise to achieve new goals, like the 2020 mobility target, institutions have in many cases been reluctant to adopt some of the changes required by Bologna, including one requiring universities to offer a three-degree cycle of bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees. In some cases, such as in Germany and the Netherlands, breaking down what was once a longer initial-degree cycle into separate bachelor's and masters degrees appears to have actually hindered mobility.

Peter van der Hijden, who works for the commission, said in an interview that after Bologna changes were adopted in the Netherlands, for example, 80 percent of students initially continued their master's studies at the institutions where they had earned their bachelor's degrees, rather than venturing out to other universities. "Students were being held hostage by institutions," he said, and felt pressured not to leave before they had completed the more advanced qualification, because the bachelor's was not yet held in high-enough regard.

Compressing the period to earn the initial degree into three years has also resulted in time pressures that have curtailed students' ability to study elsewhere.

Emma Di Iorio, of the European Students' Union, said that "Bologna hasn't done as much on the ground as we would wish." For students, the process has brought with it new difficulties in terms of degree recognition, financial barriers, and administrative hurdles, she said. Many students "are very unhappy that their degrees have been squashed into three years," she said, and they are not being mobile because they can't take time out from their hurried schedules.

The blame does not rest entirely with Bologna, Mr. van der Hijden said. The idea that Bologna is hindering mobility "is a German thesis," he said. "Because they mistrusted the bachelor's degree, they squeezed all this material into the master's, and students cannot move." Bologna was so "badly implemented" at a national level that it resulted in "overloaded" degrees, he said, and then the universities and government officials pointed fingers at Bologna to deflect blame.

Still, he predicted that the ultimate impact of Bologna "will be an increase in mobility for the full cycle. People will continue to do the bachelor's close to home, and more and more will do the master's in another country." The growth of master's programs in English will contribute to the trend, and as Europe embraces doctoral programs, mobility will also continue to increase at that level.

Jo Ritzen, president of the University of Maastricht, in the Netherlands, helped to lay the groundwork for the Bologna Process during his tenure as his country's minister of education. At one of the conference's main Bologna sessions, where he was an observer, he agreed that the vision he and his counterparts endorsed has not yet come to fruition, despite last year's official creation of the European Higher Education Area.

More than 10 years after it was conceived, "Bologna has had many effects, and has not brought what we hoped for and expected," Mr. Ritzen said. "Change has been too small and slow to come," because "its implementation was left to member states and nationalized," he said.