Greece Before the Bologna Process: Confronting or Embracing Quality Assurance in Higher Education?
- PDF / 112,834 Bytes
- 13 Pages / 468 x 680 pts Page_size
- 11 Downloads / 175 Views
Greece Before the Bologna Process: Confronting or Embracing Quality Assurance in Higher Education? Aristotelis Stamoulas 16 Pelopos Street, 175 64, Palaio Faliro, Athens, Greece. E-mail: [email protected]
The globalization of education, with its multiple associations with the growth of the knowledge society, the increasing penetration of market forces in higher education and the treatment of education as an exportable good, supplied in different forms and by various providers, exerts the need for systematic quality assurance in higher education. In Europe, the Bologna Process has urged member-states to respond quickly to the impact of globalization by facilitating tertiary assessment mechanisms to make European education attractive to foreign ‘consumers’ and at the same time to prevent academic migration to the USA. At present, Greece is among those member-states lacking some type of formal tertiary evaluation. The paper examines socio-political and economic conditions in which hostility towards quality assurance has developed. It discusses the prospects of Greece’s converging towards the quality goals of the European Higher Education Area. This case goes beyond the limits of a strictly technical debate about the implementation of evaluation procedures or what its criteria ought to be, with the purpose of presenting the broader socio-political and economic background that influences the enactment and operation of quality assurance in Greece. Higher Education Policy (2006) 19, 433–445. doi:10.1057/palgrave.hep.8300132 Keywords: higher education policy; quality assurance; Bologna Process; Greece
Internationalized Education Demands Evaluation The tremendous rise in demand for higher education qualifications in recent years has marked our times with an unprecedented diversification of tertiary institutions, programmes, awards and delivery modes, helped by advances in information and communication technologies. Ever since education was linked with market-based (Schultz, 1961; Mincer, 1962; Becker, 1964) and other nonmarket and social returns to individuals (McMahon, 2000; Wolfe and Haveman, 2002), it is high on international agendas for economic development and social well being. People have long been persuaded that by pursuing study to the highest level of which they are capable, they will improve their quality of life through higher earnings and by embracing positive social values.
Aristotelis Stamoulas Greece Before the Bologna Process
434
At the national level, governments are well aware of the strength of the labour market in shaping demands for trained human capital and, therefore, view the causal connection between education, economic growth and social cohesion with all due seriousness and by bringing educational reform into line with other facets of social and economic policy, for example, with employment and social inclusion. Internationally, states — as educational exporters — are engaged in an intense competition to accumulate the maximum advantage from the benefits that flow from the internationaliza
Data Loading...
