Undergraduate Higher Education in Europe: towards a comparative perspective

In the past 20 years, knowledge about European education systems has increased enormously thanks to the efforts of official international organisations such as OECD, the Council of Europe and the EC [1]. A number of national bodies, located within or close to universities, have also contributed to the wealth of our present knowledge through research projects and the diffusion of professional journals wholly or partly devoted to higher education [2]. Despite these favourable circumstances, one can hardly say that many significant lessons have emerged from those efforts, perhaps because many of them were restricted to a collection of works which were 'national' in outlook and, therefore, lacked a true and systematic comparative perspective. A more fundamental reason is that it is difficult to be very explicit about what one can learn from international European comparisons of education systems. Are they supposed to yield international 'norms' towards which national systems should converge? Or, less ambitiously, are they only directing the spotlight towards broad directions for change, the implicit lesson for national decision-makers still being that out-of-line situations should be corrected? Within the EC, the thorny question of the sharing of responsibilities between Brussels and the Member States is approached in the new Treaty of Maastricht in a way which acknowledges the full responsibility of the Member States for the organisation of their education systems and restricts Community action to developing the European dimension of education. This stance, which is an illustration of the often advocated 'subsidiarity' principle, does not, however, provide very clear guidelines about what needs to be 'harmonised' at the European level and what can be left to national idiosyncrasies. To take a concrete example: is it worth harmonising the duration of studies to reach a first degree in EC countries, or should a European policy be content with the harmonisation of degrees? To put it in economic terms: is it enough to ensure higher education outputs of comparable quality or should all inputs also be standardised? After the duration of studies has been dealt with, do we go on to harmonise teachers' qualifications and then the number of class hours, and so on? Indeed, it is difficult to draw the line between desirable 'harmonisation' (who can be against 'harmony' anyway?) and harmful 'standardisation' rejected by everyone. With the foregoing considerations in mind, a comparative survey of undergraduate education in five European countries was carried out in 1989 by the European Institute of Education and Social Policy at the request of the French Planning Office (Commissariat Ge'ne'ral du Plan) and the Ministry of Education (Ministere de l>Education nationale). The survey focussed on the following six key points: structures, organisation and content of courses, admissions policies, student flows, teachers and future