The Bologna Accord

This year, 2010, the Bologna Accord goes into full swing. The bottom line for Filipinos is that, starting this year, undergraduate degrees in the Philippines will no longer be recognized in most European countries. Jobs in most European countries that require undergraduate degrees will no longer be open to Filipinos who went to school in the Philippines.

What is the Bologna Accord?

The Bologna (pronounced bo-LO-nya) Accord is named after the university in which the first agreement was signed in 1999 – the University of Bologna in Italy. The Ministers of Education of 29 European countries agreed to make the school systems of their countries compatible with each other. Degrees from one country would then have to be accepted by any other country signing the Accord.

Since then, several other countries have joined the Accord, boosting the total number to 46 (including all the 27 members of the European Union). Subsequent meetings were held in Prague (2001), Berlin (2003), Bergen (2005), London (2007), and Leuven (2009).

There are many provisions of the Bologna Accord, not all of which are of interest to us. For example, the Bologna Accord tries to make European education compatible with the American system (because a lot of students travel across the Atlantic), but since we use the American system, we actually have in place some of the reforms only now being undertaken by European countries.

Let me point out a couple of provisions that have major implications for our own educational system.

The Bologna Accord establishes a European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS), which is very much like our system of units. One ECTS-credit is equivalent to about 30 hours of study.

The Bologna Accord stipulates that a student can earn an undergraduate (or Bachelor’s) degree after 180 to 240 ECTS-credits, broken down into three to four years of study at a standard 60 ECTS-credits or 1,800 hours per year. These hours are devoted only to subjects in the major field of study; in our terminology, these are called “major subjects.” Not included in the European system of study is General Education (in Europe, the term “general education” refers to what we call “basic education”); only the American system offers General Education subjects after high school.

In the Philippines, a college subject usually has three units, equivalent to 18 weeks of one-hour classes three times a week, for a total of 54 hours of study (because of exams, school activities, and holidays, the total is really closer to 50). That means that our typical college subject is roughly equivalent to two ECTS-credits.

In our system, a typical student takes at least 18 units per semester or 972 hours of study. In a year of two semesters, the student finishes 1,944 hours of study, more than the 1,800 hours required of a European student. The problem, however, is that those 18 units are not made up only of major subjects. They include not only the General Education subjects but extra subjects required by a school (religious schools, for example, understandably require religion subjects).

Our students do not actually take up enough major subjects to fulfill the requirements of the Bologna Accord. Although our students spend more hours in school than the typical European student, our students devote fewer hours to their major.

One implication for CHED is this: the CHED Technical Panels have to work overtime to revise their curricula to ensure that majors take more major subjects than they are taking now.

Another implication for CHED is this: General Education subjects (which now typically take almost two years to finish, whether all at once or spread out throughout the curriculum) have to be pared down to the more manageable American number. In the USA, General Education typically takes up only the first year of undergraduate study.

The Bologna Accord expects European undergraduate students to study for three years. There are other accords that extend these years (the Washington Accord for Engineering, for example, which I will write about soon). If we added the one year of American General Education, we will have our typical four years of undergraduate study. There is no need to add another year to college. (In other words, the Gibo proposal of making all college students stay for five years is unnecessary.)

Another provision of the Bologna Accord has to do with the content of the subjects. European undergraduate major subjects are now envisioned to focus on “practical training” (in the CHED Technical Panel on General Education, we call this “experiential learning”) and “intensive research projects.” Relying only on textbooks or lectures, on examinations full of questions based on recall or memory, and on attendance inside classrooms is now considered unacceptable for European students. Students there – and therefore, our own students here – now have to get out and do research on their own.

Starting 2010, university education should be and will be what it was in the glorious days of the old universities – extending the frontiers of knowledge, challenging received or conventional wisdom, standing on the shoulders and not merely being disciples of giants. The concept of a “teaching university” will be an oxymoron; all universities will be “research universities,” devoted to helping humanity solve the problems of the world.