Four years ago in Bologna, 29 European ministers in charge of higher education launched a process designed to create a European higher education area incorporating a system of comparable undergraduate and graduate degrees, with a credit system that would promote mobility among European universities and attract students from overseas to Europe, writes Garret FitzGerald
Last night in Berlin, the third of a series of ministerial conferences on the process concluded.
At first sight the Bologna process proposal for a standard European undergraduate bachelor's degree offering a prospect of employment, followed by a master's degree, with the possibility of a subsequent doctorate for those who wish to pursue academic life further, appeared to fit in with the system that we have been accustomed to in Ireland.
The countries of continental Europe, many of which do not have a bachelor's degree stage but go straight to a degree after five years, at first sight appear to face the biggest adjustment.
At least some of those countries have been adapting rapidly, however, whereas in Ireland and Britain over recent decades some university faculties, such as engineering, have moved to a four-year degree, so we now face a problem of how to relate to the process.
In its concern to facilitate student mobility within Europe and to make it easier for students from elsewhere to come to European higher-level institutes, the process relies heavily on a European Credit Transfer System (ECTS), which equates qualifications on the basis of a what is a very crude measure, viz. student contact hours.
For this purpose, a normal term's work is usually evaluated at 20 units, and a three-year degree at 180 units
This may work reasonably well for universities within Ireland, where all have broadly similar standards. But it is much less satisfactory in a country like Britain, where some polytechnics, arbitrarily reclassified as universities under Margaret Thatcher's government, are simply not in the same league as many of the older British universities - let alone heavily-endowed Oxford or Cambridge.
Similarly, a university in a southern European country that has a combination of open entrance without qualifications, huge student-staff ratios, enormous classes, and a first-year drop-out rate of up to 50 per cent, is simply not comparable with a good Dutch or Scandinavian university.
Between such diverse institutes comparability based solely on student contact hours is clearly inadequate. Many continental universities are tightly controlled by the state, whereas in these islands, as in the US and many Commonwealth countries, universities are autonomous.
The autonomous Irish and British universities seem to be unique in having always had an extern examiner system to monitor the quality - and fairness of marking - of their degrees. In the NUI, this scheme has in recent years been greatly extended and improved by securing fuller reporting by the examiners to the university authorities.
But, recognising their responsibility to the community, the autonomous universities in Ireland have also recently developed a much more extensive quality assurance system, under which the work of every department is evaluated independently - an operation in which the students play a part.
As this new scheme reaches completion in the near future it will itself be independently evaluated by a board of 14 people, half of them from outside the Irish university system, with a judge as chair.
This unique Irish quality assessment system is getting under way in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of a bureaucratic evaluation state system in Britain, which proved a total disaster. The Irish approach could provide a model for other European states and, if it did, could help to overcome the crudity of international comparisons based solely on student contact hours.
A useful early outcome of the Bologna process has been the decision that by the year after next students will be entitled to a "Diploma Supplement" - a detailed document supplementing their degree parchments, in English as well as in the local language. Throughout Europe this document will be set out in a standard form for the benefit of employers and others, and it will provide full details of what each student has studied in the course of securing the qualification.
However, a weakness in the Bologna process is that whereas inputs are being made into it by university presidents, students, professional bodies and the business community - all organised on a European basis - in the absence of any European organisation of academics, this group, arguably the most directly affected by the changes, seems to have no real voice.
As a founding and current member of the Irish Federation of University Teachers (IFUT) - I am the only Taoiseach who when in office was a member of a trade union affiliated to congress - I find this very disturbing.
Even though we have a small academic community by European standards, I suggest that, in the absence of any move on this matter by academics in the larger countries, IFUT should take some initiative to bring together whatever national organisations of academics may exist in Europe.
The Bologna process is particularly important for Ireland because it is likely to increase greatly the mobility of staff and students in European institutions of higher education - and, above all, the inflow of students from outside Europe.
And for a country that first of all is English-speaking but is also likely in the period ahead to have many higher education spaces to fill because of the impending demographic decline in our student age cohort, an increase in the flow of extra-European students will be particularly important in economic terms.
For several decades past student mobility within Europe has been improved by several EU schemes: Erasmus and Socrates.
I recall that in the mid-1970s when minister for foreign affairs, I was warned by one of our university presidents that moves were afoot in some European education ministries to block the introduction of such a scheme. I alerted the French and German foreign ministers to this danger. They were shocked to hear of this obstruction, and the Erasmus scheme for student mobility was launched shortly afterwards.
Finally, a recent study of the European university system has shown that there are widespread academic fears of external pressures from governments and business for greater "employability" of students, and for making courses "more relevant to society".
Both academics and more sophisticated employers are concerned about the possible long-term impact of the fashionable emphasis being placed upon what are sometimes vocational courses with limited intellectual content - useful in the short-term, perhaps, in terms of getting a first job, but not designed to develop students' capacity for innovation and leadership later on in their careers.
It is not only in Ireland that economic "short-termism" on the part of the public authorities is threatening to distort the higher education system.