European universities struggle to open their minds
PHILIPPA RUNNER
01.07.2008 @ 09:59 CET
EUOBSERVER / FOCUS - European universities are getting better at raising money, linking-up with industry and breaking down national barriers in the race against US and Asian schools. But tension between some aspects of academic culture and government policy threatens to hold back Europe's leap forward.
Employability of students has stayed low down the priority list (Photo: European Commission)
"[Cultivating] a real love of beauty...is the true aim of education," Irish dramatist Oscar Wilde wrote in his essay The Artist as Critic in 1891. But the days when Europe's universities stood unchallenged as playgrounds for gentlemen or temples to scientific knowledge for knowledge's sake are gone.
"The cognitive skills of the population...are powerfully related to individual earnings, the distribution of income and economic growth," Munich University's "education economics" guru, Ludger Woessman, wrote in a March 2008 study, reflecting prevailing thinking among European policy makers today.
The EU governments' stated objective is to make Europe "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-driven economy by 2010." When EU education ministers met in May, they reiterated that "creativity is the prime source of innovation, which in turn is...the main driver of growth and wealth creation."
But with EU economic growth for 2008 forecast at 2 percent compared to 2.4 percent in the US and 10 percent in China and with American universities embarrassing European schools in world rankings while Asian schools climb the ladder, Europe's 2010 target is already well out of reach.
Europe had just 12 universities in the top 50 places in the latest Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) survey, compared to 20 US schools. In the 2004 edition, China had no universities in the top tier, by 2007 two mainland Chinese schools had made it to the 36th and 40th spots.
Europe placed 9 universities in the top 50 compared to 38 US schools in a parallel study by the University of Shanghai. In the 2004 version mainland China had only four higher education institutions in the top 500, but by 2007 the number rose to 14.
The THES and Shanghai reports are based on criteria involving Nobel Prizes, research publications and international student numbers, with America's Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Massachusetts universities and the UK's Oxford, Cambridge and London schools consistently on top.
A third study by the Ecole des Mines de Paris, which bases rankings on how many alumni have ended up as CEOs of the world's richest 500 companies, paints a similar picture of American dominance. Europe scoops 20 of the top 59 places, while the US holds 24 and China has one.
Part of the explanation lies in funding. EU states on average channel 1.3 percent of their GDP into higher education, or €8,700 per student, with the majority of funds coming from the state purse. The US piles in 3.3 percent or €36,500, with most of the money from private sponsorship.
But funding is not the whole story of Europe's lost academic and economic potential. Traditionally, European universities have given out a bewildering variety of degrees, some taking between five and seven years to earn. Linguistic, administrative and cultural barriers have hampered cross-border cooperation.
Faculties have struggled with control from national bureaucracies while at the same time resisting performance assessments. Employability of students has stayed low down the priority list and academia has retained a left-wing, egalitarian ideology complicating some types of reform.
Bring in the bling
On the funding side, European governments are giving universities more opportunities to raise money. Schools in Germany, the UK, Spain, Italy, Portugal, the Netherlands, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Estonia already have full autonomy on how to spend tuition fees.
The vast majority of EU states - but not Germany, Austria, Sweden and Poland - give tax breaks to private donors of university cash, with Oxford University in May embarking on a US-type project to raise €1.6 billion from alumni and the private sector.
France in 2007 allowed universities to create private foundations and set academic salaries, resulting in the opening this year of the new Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) with the help of corporate funds. The TSE was called a "model of excellence" by the chairman of France's BNP Paribas bank.
Eighteen out of the 27 EU states have made an increase in public funding a "national strategic priority" in the past two years, while 14 have prioritised giving universities more control in the management of financial resources, according to the European Commission's April 2008 "Eurydice" study.
The EU is also helping to channel extra money into Europe's scientific sector. The so-called Seventh Framework Programme for research and technological development received a budget of €51 billion for the 2007 to 2013 period, compared to €17.5 billion for the 2002 to 2006 slot.
Cleaning the cobwebs
On the institutional reform side, the 46 national signatories to the "Bologna Process" - a 1999 initiative to harmonise European degree qualifications - now see 82 percent of European universities give out degrees on the bachelors/masters/PhD model first developed in the UK.
"The essential point about Bologna is that it splits continental Europe's traditional degree - which can take five years or more to complete - into two separate parts. After three or four years, students will graduate with a bachelor degree, and choose whether to go out into employment or press on with a masters," London-based think-tank the Centre for European Reform says.
Employability of students is considered "very important" by 67 percent of European universities compared to 56 percent four years ago, according to the latest "Trends V" survey by the European University Association.
But the changing orientation toward economic opportunities in European higher education has its limits, with the same Trends V report saying "there is still much to be done to translate this priority [employability] into institutional practice. For many institutions this requires a change in culture that will take time."
The big debate
Writing in February about the culture of French and German academia, German Marshall Fund of the United States analyst Stefan Theil identified a deep hostility toward entrepreneurship and the corporate world that begins with skewed economics textbooks in high schools.
"One might expect Europeans to view the world through a slightly left-of-center, social-democratic lens. The surprise is the intensity and depth of the anti-market bias taught in Europe's schools," Mr Theil says. "Students learn that private companies destroy jobs while government policy creates them. Employers exploit while the state protects. Free markets offer chaos."
When in June 2008, the French senate proposed pushing performance-related funding for research from 20 percent to 50 percent, while assessing performance on the basis of corporate funds attracted and alumni wage levels after leaving school, French student unions went on the warpath.
"This is the debate we must have over the next couple of years, not just in Britain but in Europe as a whole," British analyst Timothy Garton-Ash wrote in UK daily The Guardian in May. "Can we, in Europe, have social justice in higher education and world-class research universities? Or must we choose?"