The Bologna Process I

I’ve been intending to write something about the Bologna Process, but I’ve procrastinated. Now Stan Katz has forced my hand. In the April 9 Chronicle of Higher Education, Katz blogs about the Lumina Foundation’s project to extend Europe’s Bologna Process to the U.S. The aim of the project in Europe is “to create a shared understanding among higher education’s stakeholders of the subject-specific knowledge and transferable skills that students…must demonstrate upon completion of a degree program.” Katz writes that

The American effort will be led by groups in Indiana, Minnesota and Utah. Each of these states will “draft learning outcomes and map the relations between these outcomes and graduates’ employment options” in at least two academic disciplines. The intention is to design frameworks for the different degrees rather than to standardize curricula, with the hope that undergraduate education will be more responsive to changes in knowledge and its application, more relevant to “societal needs and workforce demands,” and more conducive to student transfer and retention.

Katz’s impetus for his blog post is a New York Times article reporting that “Indiana will draft learning standards for education, history and chemistry degrees; Utah for history and physics; and Minnesota for graphic design and chemistry.” According to the Times article,

The goal is to give universities, students and employers in a global economy enough quality assurance and comparability that wherever a student obtains a degree, it would stand for the same thing and be widely accepted.

In the United States, there is little understanding, or consensus, about what a particular degree at a particular institution stands for….

The article quotes Clifford Adelman, of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, who says

Go to a university catalog and look at the degree requirements for a particular discipline….It says something like, ‘You take Anthropology 101, then Anthro 207, then you have a choice of Anthro 310, 311, or 312. We require the following courses, and you’ve got to have 42 credits.’ That means absolutely nothing.

The new approach would detail specific skills to be learned:

If you’re majoring in chemistry, here is what I expect you to learn in terms of laboratory skills, theoretical knowledge, applications, the intersection of chemistry with other sciences, and broader questions of environment and forensics.

Here is a news release from the Lumina Foundation about the new project.

Here is the official website for the Bologna Process in Europe.

Stay tuned. There’s more to come and more to say about the Bologna Process.