Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/58061
Each country must find a way both to protect its home culture and to design an open system that facilitates the mobility of students and visitors. A History of Integration Europe has been striving toward some degree of legal and institutional integration since the Rome Treaty established the European Economic Community in 1957. The central objective of integration is to provide all European citizens access to economic prosperity and high standards of living. This is achieved by engineering national systems in areas such as economic policy, public security, and customer protection. Higher education was widely democratized after World War II, and in 2005, more than 40 percent of the current genera- tion had some level of higher education. No national or local scheme could have matched such an expansion. The Bologna Accord is not Europe's first attempt specifi- cally to focus on the integration of education. In the 1980s, many European institutions joined the ERASMUS initiative, intended to allow thousands of students easy access to uni- versities across the continent. ERASMUS, which still oper- ates today, makes it as easy for students to register for a term 600 miles away as to take a course across the street in their home towns. Over the last 20 years, more than a million stu- dents have won ERASMUS grants to study in Europe. As the ERASMUS initiative began to take hold, it was clear there were only two ways to allow mobility to Euro- pean students on a grand scale without disturbing the cur- ricula of participating schools: Design programs with built-in interruptions long enough to allow students time to study abroad; or design an academic process that recognized the courses students took and skills they acquired at other insti- tutions. The latter was obviously the most sustainable and started to become the norm. Business schools in particular began to synchronize their programs to allow for easy ex- change of students and faculty. This enhanced mobility led directly to improvements at institutions across Europe. Every student or faculty member who visited another country was able to see differences in processes and outcomes; many returned home with ideas for improvement. At the very least, these ideas generated inter- esting discussions in classrooms and cafeterias. As the sharing of ideas led to more standardized programs, it became easier to implement benchmarking systems, joint research activi- ties, and inter-institutional collaborations. Mobility has done more to change management practices at the university level than any reform policy suggested by any administrator. In the 1990s, universities began moving from bilateral agreements with other universities to a broader set of Euro- pean rules—what has become the BMD system. Now, each degree is more precisely defined in areas such as duration, academic credits, and content equivalence. For instance, a 34 BizEd MAY/JUNE 2007 bachelor's degree will consist of 180 credits and a master's degree of 120 credits. A student can gain a maximum of 60 credits in one year's time, regardless of the subject or the intensity of the learning process. As the Bologna Agreement is implemented, each country must find a way both to protect its home culture and to de- sign an open system that facilitates the mobility of students and visitors. Each country has to compare its national educa- tional system to other European nations and then modernize what is below accepted norms. In countries where both public and private education systems operate, the government must end state monopoly of degree-awarding rights. At the same time, individual business schools must examine their offerings and compare them to the programs at other schools—trans- forming them if necessary. Obviously, these changes are not simple, and implementation is proceeding at a slow pace. Change for the Better While the Bologna Accord is forcing schools to reassess and reconstruct their programs, most of these changes have been positive. For instance, each school decides how to validate the credits from other programs. To determine how to qualify those outside courses, program directors must take a hard look at their own courses, and they also must consider the opinions of the students involved. Because of this type of internal audit, some institutions have grown more focused on their own specializations and have improved the quality of their offerings. Schools also must craft strong programs if they want to at- tract students from other countries. Then, to make sure their classes will be accepted at the students' home universities, schools must develop widely applicable assessment methods and learning objectives. They must devise metrics to measure goals, achievement, and student satisfaction. In many cases, none of these systems were in place before. There are many other benefits to the educational reform prompted by the Bologna Accord: n Students become individuals; they are no longer simply citizens who must accept the quality of education available in their nations. n Faculty can employ more innovative teaching methods as the new system makes these methods more viable. At the same time, faculty must comply with the European Credit Transfer System, which forces them to justify their methods and the content of their classes. n The curriculum and the classroom are both revised to make globalization an integral part of study. n Institutions continually upgrade their offerings and