The other view of a Boiling Higher Education … with or without Brussels sprouts

Let’s just for a second consider the following semiotics: The “Youth in Action” programme responsible to set the youth in “action”, it’s a programme of the EU under the Lifelong Learning Programme along with other programmes like Erasmus, Comenius, Grundtvig, Leonardo Da Vinci! Two years ago, the European Commission (EC) launched the Initiative called “Youth on the Move” aiming to set the youth on the “move” in search for job opportunities! And only recently the EC announced through the mouth of President Barroso a new scheme called the “Youth Guarantees”, which only a month ago has become part of the “Youth Employment Package” along with the “Youth Opportunities” scheme!

So much about Youth from the European Union (EU) side!

Now here is the other view… unemployment among young people has reached and exceeded in some cases 50%, which is much higher than the unemployment rates of the general population. This is happening in a generation of young people that, at least, when it comes to formal qualifications, have achieved more than any other generation before.

Who is to blame for this situation? Education! According to EU the education systems have not yet adapted fully to the needs of the labour market. The so called mismatch between qualifications and what enterprises need is the result of this “failure” of education systems. A failure that is often passed on to the teachers, even students themselves.

What is actually claimed by the EU is a more “effective” relationship between education and economy. This is not a new relationship after all. It’s a relationship like any other, which could either lead to a wedding or a divorce. It’s a relationship where both sides of the families claim their “legitimate rights” to interfere in the relationship of the couple. EU in the role of the priest is preaching the new bible… Europe 2020. Seeking the more firm implementation of EU 2020 Strategy, through closer monitoring of the “progress” made by Member States in targets and well established processes like the Bologna process and the Copenhagen process, the EU puts the principle of subsidiarity at risk.

The other view of the relationship of education and economy is not yet revealed. The influence of funding cuts to higher education through a deliberate distancing of the state from the education institutions, the consumerism of technology products used in education, the vast expansion of open education resources (more acronyms are entering our life, MOOC, Massive Open Online Courses is the new trend on distant “learning”) the change of the language of teaching in traditional universities (recently the University of Milan switched completely to English), the expansion of franchised qualifications are just some of the visible trends for higher education.

In order to complete the puzzle, we need to go back to when everything started for higher education.  

Back in the 12^th century, when the first universities of Bologna and Paris were established, the mayor of the town of Bologna decided to take over the responsibility to pay the salaries of the teaching staff of the university after he realised that having the university in his town was providing an important economic boost. Sometime later, the university in Paris saw its student and staff abandoning the town of Paris after conflicts between the local shop keepers and the students and after failing to provide support for the students. It was after this movement of academic staff that the universities of Oxford and Cambridge were established.

For centuries, the knowledge produced in these pioneer universities was controlled by the church and there was no real production of scientific knowledge (in fact I claim that new scientific knowledge is again at minimal level today). In fact, in England during the industrial revolution the interaction and influence of the local universities in the production of scientific knowledge was caught in the conflicts between catholic and protestant churches offering little value to the industrial discoveries. It was Napoleon who created the Université de France in 1808 aiming to give a more practical orientation to higher education. This was meant to be a higher education institution that was state dependant, in order to support the state by delivering qualified employees. This was the first time we had induction criteria for students other than the socioeconomic class.

In England of 19^th century, the relationship between economy and higher education started to thrive with the establishment of more practice-oriented universities, as opposed to the traditional schools of Oxford and Cambridge.

In Germany 1810, Humboldt establishes the University of Berlin. This is the first time that the question “education vs. economy” gets an education-favouring response. The Humboldt University model supported universities in their role to blend harmonically teaching and research to produce new scientific knowledge. This new knowledge offered to its students and society would not be profession-oriented. This University has developed to be the model for academic freedom and society-centred orientation of education.

After the Second World War and the economic boost that followed until early 1970s, education has become an important political priority not only in Europe but also in the USA. The Sputnik shock and the opening of the big markets as a result of the destruction of the Second World War have given higher education the description of the new “El Dorado” of capitalism. In this period we have huge investments in education, with countries like the USA, Sweden and UK investing 15% of their budget on education policies.

In these conditions, there was a strong boost of universities wanting to expand. Universities opened their gates to students from lower economic backgrounds in search to satisfy the demand for better trained employees. The reason is that the big markets saw the potential of universities to produce human capital as an important investment for their entrepreneurial activities, offering them higher margin of profit than the installation of new technology. Of course, this has eventually created a “pool” of new diplomas and, therefore, new graduates of these diplomas, that soon after in the 1970’s would face unemployment. This “pool” was then used by the neoliberals to accuse higher education for over spending without “offering” employability.

In the mid 1970s, the unemployment rised to 6.7% in the USA and 4.8% in the European Economic Community. The higher education entered a new period of turmoil. The Universities were then accused for producing graduates that had qualifications, which were not related to the immediate needs of the labour market at the expense of the tax payer. The governments of Thatcher and Reagan in the UK and the USA, respectively, followed this path of the neoliberal approaches cutting down any funding to the Universities forcing them to find their own sources.

This is the period when the first signs of Bologna process start to appear.

In 1988 the rectors of 430 European universities met in Bologna to sign the Magna Charta Universitareum Europeaum. In this text appears for the first time what later will be identified by Bologna process as the European Higher Education Area.  It is obvious that, at institutional level, economy wins over education and higher education has now to function within an internal market context which, for reasons of rhetoric, was called European Higher Education Area.

The signing of Bologna Declaration in 1999 has come as a “normal” follow-up. Within the European Higher Education Area, the undersigned countries agreed to regulate their systems to establish a 2-cycle system of qualifications (it was some years later that this was converted to a 3-cycle model). They agreed on systems to establish mechanisms monitoring the “quality” of the programmes of study and the “quality” of the qualifications while, at the same time, they would improve mobility through a system of credits.

In the years that followed, this process has converted the programmes of studies into “small packages of condensed information-based knowledge” oriented for specialised professions, while it has converted the Humboldt perception of academic freedom into a free entrance of the enterprises to the running of universities (free schools model).

This is how higher education in its 4000 higher education institutions across the EU looks like today. In this context, the need to re-define the role of higher education is imminent. The discourse led by the left needs now to overcome Bologna. The damage is done. More damage is ahead of us. But before witnessing along with the queues of unemployed youth, the new “American dream” allowing big companies to offer their own recognised bachelors and Masters promising “direct” employment, we need to react. The discussion whether reaction needs to evolve within or outside the current system is a real one; however, on both sides of the arguments of the left, the sensitivity is there as well as the prospect for a better society… not in the next century but for us… the living tired youth of today!