EU gaat hoger onderwijs aanpassen

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Kennelijk zijn er plannen op EU-nivo om het hoger onderwijs aan te passen.

Groet / Cees

A blessing for Brussels

Zoe McKenzie | September 23, 2009
Article from:  The Australian
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26110936-25192,00.html
WHEN Brendan Nelson packs his bags and heads for Brussels in February, he
will take with him a legacy of reform and a kit bag of political courage,
none more pronounced than in the portfolio of higher education.

Whether or not you agree with the Nelson reforms from 2001 through to
2006, there is no doubt he redesigned the sector's operation and realigned
its orientation. His Backing Australia's Future package made Australia's
universities more independent, more diverse and more resilient.

Nelson will arrive in Europe at a critical time in its higher education
reform agenda. To date, the European Union has remained selective about
its intervention in higher education policy-making: overseeing the Bologna
Process with varying degrees of take-up and instituting Erasmus, the
exchange system that has assisted more than two million European students
undertake study for one or more semesters in a university in another EU
country.

However, like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,
the EU in recent years has started to advocate a higher education model
that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Australian system: delicately
campaigning for tuition fees for domestic and international students and
deferred income-contingent student loans for local students.

The Australian model polarises opinion on the Continent. Britain's
relatively recent elevation of tuition fees and introduction of deferred
income-contingent loans is seen by some as radical and inequitable and by
others as innovative and the way of the future. In higher education policy
circles some say: we'll have to watch how this draconian new system works.
Others know, and as Nelson can explain, it has been working well in
Australia for 20 years.

Individual European nations have embarked on higher education reform with
limited success. France's President Nicolas Sarkozy came to power in May
2006 with a promise to create a first-class, world-leading higher
education system.

His campaign commitments included instituting a selection process for
university, making students pay tuition fees for courses with no
professional outcomes and giving universities their administrative and
financial independence.

The legislation ensuing from these promises did, however, little more than
limit university councils to 30 members or less and require universities
to run a pre-enrolment system to guide final-year school students in their
course choices. Modest financial and administrative independence has been
achieved. While 51 of the country's 83 universities have been declared
autonomous, their new levels of self-determination would make the average
Australian vice-chancellor blush.

France's policy package was low on political smarts. It involved a
significant injection of funds but extracted little long-term reform in
exchange. This is where Nelson may be of most use in Europe. For a
conservative politician, Nelson achieved the unachievable: $10 billion in
new funding and 30,000 new domestic undergraduate places in exchange for
wide-ranging structural and financial reform, and a well-overdue (although
since lost) graduation into a 21st- century workplace relations milieu.

If France's higher education reforms are to be considered the most
ambitious in the EU in the past 10 years, Nelson arrives just in time with
oodles of experience and reformist zeal. He may be lonely and his task
will be tough.

It is hard to imagine Nelson, a man with deep-felt empathy for everyday
people, among a European parliamentary class made up (but for a few
exceptions such as the McDonald's-deconstructing sheep farmer Jose Bove)
of willingly or unwillingly retired politicians, young ones wanting to
earn their stripes before moving on to domestic politics, and only rarely
the brilliant and truly European minded.

But Nelson is a man of many fine Australian attributes, chief among them
great can-do tenacity.

Zoe McKenzie, a former Howard government adviser and researcher at the
Paris-based Fondation pour l'innovation politique, works in the private
sector.

**********
Dit bericht is verzonden via de informele D66 discussielijst (D66 at nic.surfnet.nl).
Aanmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SUBSCRIBE D66 uwvoornaam uwachternaam
Afmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SIGNOFF D66
Het on-line archief is te vinden op: http://listserv.surfnet.nl/archives/d66.html
**********