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A Load of Bologna
May 9, 2008
Alex Usher, Vice President, Educational Policy Institute
If I hear the phrase “Canada needs to have its own Bologna process” again this year, I shall scream. Loudly and intemperately.
A bit of background: the Bologna process, as most of you know, is of European origin, and possibly this in itself is what makes Canadians of a certain persuasion go weak at the knees. Its purpose, in so many words, is to create a “European Higher Education Area”, by making university degree and quality assurance standards more common across Europe.
This ambitious project makes a tremendous amount of sense in Europe. Prior to its implementation, member countries had first-degree programs ranging from 3 to 6 years in length. Some had no bachelor`s degree at all. The continent as a whole had a complete mish-mash of credentials; what constituted a degree in one country was about a half a degree in another. This, not surprisingly, impeded labour mobility, and since labour mobility is one of the hallmarks of the EU project, the Bologna process made eminent sense.
For some reason, a number of Canadian commentators (the Canadian Council on Learning, and Maclean’s magazine’s Erin Millar, to name but two) have decided that we, too, need to do something like this. What they seem to miss is that the purpose of Bologna is not to create one pan-European system of education, but rather to make individual national systems at least mutually intelligible. In other words, Bologna aims to make Europe like Canada.
As we all know, Canada has ten provincial systems of post-secondary education. Their differences exist principally because of differences in their systems of college education and they way they ladder (or don`t) to the university system; not because of differences in a university system. Employers in Saskatchewan understand that a degree from a Nova Scotia university is pretty much the same as a degree from the Universities of Saskatchewan or Regina. Provided they are granted by recognized universities, a BA is a BA and a BSc is a BSc.
This is the only problem Bologna was designed to solve. Canada has already solved it. So what’s the problem, exactly?
Ah, say the Bologna-enthusiasts, but what about the accompanying European Credit Transfer System (ECTS)? We don’t have one of those - those Europeans are way ahead of us in terms of fostering mobility, which we should encourage for national unity purposes, etc. But again, this is to misunderstand the European system.
The Europeans do have a formal system to encourage mobility, which is known as Erasmus. Basically, Erasmus is a way to fund students who would like to do a term or a year in another European country. But to make this work, students had to be able to count the work they did at their host institution towards a degree at their host institution. This used to be difficult because not all European countries were on a credit system, and those that were operated vastly different system (some gave out 15 credits per year, some gave out 70, and so on). ECTS is primarily a way to standardize these systems so as to facilitate semesters in other institutions. Canadian institutions don’t have this problem – everybody knows what a 5-course load looks like.
Some might still get upset that a home institution might not accept all the credits taken at a host institution for the purposes of graduation, but this issue still exists under Europe’s ECTS. As long as each institution has its own Senate in charge of authorizing degrees, that kind of thing is bound to happen no matter what kind of inter-governmental system is in place. All ECTS does is get Europe to roughly where Canada is already. So what’s the big deal?
The “deal”, of course, is that there is a class of (Anglophone) Canadians who genuinely believe that Canada is emasculated as a nation without a National ministry of education. Pan-Canadian initiatives like a pseudo-Bologna process are like manna from heaven for these people. But really, what are the arguments in favour of such centralization?
Would a national ministry of education or a pseudo-Bologna process give us a better national system of universities? The US managed to build arguably the world’s best system of universities without a ministry (the Education Department was a creation of the late Carter administration – it’s hard to say the American system has improved much since its creation). And to the extent that European universities are improving right now, it’s because of decisions rooted in national governments, not the Bologna process.
Would a national ministry give us better data on universities (a common complaint among the pro-centralist crowd)? Admittedly, national data on education could be improved, but the holes in Canadian data reporting aren’t due to problems with provincial governments – they are due to Statistics Canada’s (that’s a federal department, folks) inability of the national Statistics Agency to persuade institutions to adopt a new data reporting system and a reluctance (compared to other countries) to impute data where it is not 100% complete. And Bologna has no real data component to it.
The only thing a national ministry or a pseudo-Bologna process might give us is a national quality assurance system. Ten years ago, this wasn’t so important – universities gave out degrees, colleges gave out diplomas and everybody was happy. With the profusion of college degrees, “Applied Bachelor’s Degrees” and the like, this isn’t so clear any more, and I for one think this is starting to hurt the image of all Canadian institutions internationally.
But recognizing these new degree types is as much a problem within certain provinces (i.e. Ontario) as it is between them. Moreover, there are ways to devise a national system that don’t involve a national ministry or some sort of Bologna process.
We have real problems in higher education in Canada. The lack of a Bologna-like process isn’t one of them. Let’s move on, and deal with the real issues.
Enjoy the weekend.
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