Higher Education, Mobility and the Subsidiarity Principle
Two issues related to higher education in Europe are addressed in this chapter; one relates to the mobility of students especially the Bologna process, the other to that of researchers, with a special focus on the new starting grants of the European Resea
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Marcel Gérard
6.1 Introduction Two issues related to higher education in Europe are addressed in this chapter; one relates to the mobility of students especially the Bologna process, the other to that of researchers, with a special focus on the new starting grants of the European Research Council. In both cases subsidiarity is at stake. However, though in the Bologna framework no central or inter-jurisdictional cooperative institution is in charge of efficiently assigning the task of organizing the financing of mobile students, in the other issue competences have already been assigned to the European Commission, in a way which does not exclude the exercise of similar competences by national or sub-national levels of power. Regarding the Bologna process, we issue and discuss the proposition that, rather than subsidising the schools and universities located in its territory, each government provides the students, whose it is the government of the country of origin, with vouchers. These vouchers can be used either at home or abroad to enrol for credits in schools whose quality has been certified. Providing the students with vouchers may mean giving them vouchers for free, selling them or lending them the vouchers. Regarding the mobility of researchers, we discuss the consistency of the assignment of similar competences to various levels of governments. Our discussion suggests that, if national or sub-national governments have to be permitted to compete for attracting researchers on their territory, it makes sense to also assign the twofold mission of research and regional
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Marcel Gérard
policy to a central agency, provided that its strong commitment toward the poorer region is well established. Furthermore, the two levels of government need to decide simultaneously on their respective actions since that scenario dominates other settings where the three players interact. The mobility of students is addressed in Section 6.2 and that of researchers in Section 6.3. To both topics we attempt to apply the subsidiarity test suggested by Ederveen et al. (2008). Section 4 concludes the chapter.
6.2 Mobile students: from the Production to the Origin Principle The Bologna process was launched in that Italian city on June 19, 1999 when the representatives of the Ministers of Higher Education of 21 European countries or sub-national jurisdictions signed a common declaration, which intended to achieve the following objectives within the first decade of the new millennium: x adoption of a system of easily readable and comparable degrees, x adoption of a system essentially based on two main cycles, undergraduate and graduate, x establishment of a system of credits - such as in the ECTS system,1 x promotion of mobility by overcoming obstacles to the effective exercise of free movement, x promotion of European cooperation in quality, x promotion of the necessary European dimensions in higher education. Already today students go abroad to get a degree, and that category is expected to increase in the future since the Bologna pro
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