The timing of your convention has been aptly chosen. Now that at ministerial level the final preparations are being made for setting the political agenda at Bergen and beyond, it is important that the organisation representing the students in Europe should gather to prepare their recommendations to be forwarded to the politicians. In this sense your meeting is the counterpart of the EUA convention in Glasgow later this month.
In a general way I would argue that the Bologna process has been successful so far and has had a shaping impact on the European Higher Education Area mainly because it has associated the relevant stakeholders, the institutions and the students.
The students have been associated in a most active way. After all it was you who reminded us politicians of the importance of the social dimension in the Bologna process. Whereas in Bologna, talk was mostly about increasing the competitiveness of European higher education and of structuring it in a simple, visible way so that it would become more attractive to students and researchers form other regions of the world, it was the Prague summit under the impulse of ESIB that stressed that higher education is a public good and thus a public responsibility. The Luxembourg government endorses this point of view. Its general policy is to strike the right balance between social responsibility and economic competitiveness. This incidentally is also how we have interpreted the Lisbon Agenda all along and in that sense the Bologna Process contributes to achieving the goals set out in Lisbon in 2000.
While you have been an active partner in the process, you have also made it more transparent to the students at grass root level. At some stage the Bologna Process risked becoming unpopular with students in Europe, mainly because it was thought to have been initiated with a view to reducing costs. You have played an important part in setting the right tone for the discussions and politicians in Europe are grateful to you for this role.
One of the tools of the social dimension is student mobility. Let us not forget that one of the reasons for initiating the Bologna Process was that it was deemed necessary to make students more mobile. Experiencing European citizenship and preparing oneself for a European labour market go hand in hand. Student mobility is thus a way of fostering mutual understanding in Europe’s diversity and so it also contributes to the social cohesion of our societies. At the same time the advent of a multicultural knowledge based society calls for competencies that cannot be acquired in one single national context. Integration into the European internal labour market is dependent on a multicultural awareness and mobility is the tool to define this broadened horizon.
Fostering student mobility has been a cornerstone of Luxembourg’s higher education policy for more than a century. For historic reasons our professionals have always been trained abroad and this has served us well. Being situated at the crossroads of two major European cultures, the German and the French one, has meant that we have had to develop an understanding of both. Today with an immigrant population accounting for more than one third of the total population we need these multicultural competencies if we want our society to remain a cohesive one. At the same time our economic performance has also been boosted by this student mobility. Having professionals coming from different intellectual systems cooperating alongside each other in the same company has given the latter a competitive edge in export markets.
In spite of the manifold benefits of mobility schemes, these need to be handled with care. The Bologna process comprises 41 countries across Europe, with five more waiting to be admitted into it at Bergen and these countries are at different stages of their economic development. This somewhat all too obvious statement has two implications.
Experience has shown that mobility can easily lead to a situation where mobile students and researchers choose the new country as their permanent home and so brain gain and brain drain all of a sudden become the two sides of the same coin. Cooperation must not increase what has come to be called the northwest southeast divide in higher education with the economic high flyers and their strong research universities attracting the brightest heads.
A second point is that mobility schemes need to be fair and equitable. A student should not be denied access into higher education and participation in mobility programs on economic grounds. This may involve rethinking some financing mechanisms within existing EU programmes. We are willing to raise the question if the current allocation keys are the right ones.
Let me finally say a few words about the main topic of your Convention, namely financing higher education. I know that in economically difficult times this is a hot potato, but at the same time I advocate an approach in which there is room for nuances.
The Bologna process is about higher education being a public good. This calls for a continuing and sustainable financing of higher education. At present I am not too worried about it. The discourse of the Lisbon agenda has put research and training at the forefront of the political debate. Compared with the political agendas of the 1980ies and the 1990ies, education in general and higher education and research in particular have not been so prominent in the public discourse for a long time.
I note with satisfaction that there is a general awareness across Europe that research needs investing into. This awareness should serve higher education well. In the 1970ies the debate was about democratisation of higher education, in the sense that it was about increasing access to universities and thus turning them from an elitist perspective into institutions providing education for a greater number of students. Therefore talk was about the massification of higher education. In the 1990ies the main focus was on the democratisation of higher education systems in the countries of the former eastern block. Democratisation was then understood in a political sense, it was about the governance of the institutions. Today there is the awareness that if we want to successfully meet the challenges of globalisation we need an effective and efficient higher education system. This entails that there is a readiness across Europe to invest in research. The Luxembourg government plans to meet the target of investing 1% of GDP in public research by 2010. To achieve this goal we are currently setting up our own research university. I see similar trends in other European countries.
However, the issue that is a major concern to you is the question of tuition fees. I hold two principles. One, I am not against tuition fees. Two, no one should be denied access to higher education on economic grounds. Let me explain this position. The western European welfare states are taxed to their utmost and this means that in all areas of our social systems we need to call upon individual responsibility. The balance needs to be struck between solidarity and individual involvement or participation. This holds true for health systems and social security, but it is also the case for higher education. Students are active citizens, they have all the political and civil rights and thus they also have a responsibility for the common wealth. In terms of implementing the principle of solidarity, our grant and loan systems must be such that students have fair access to higher education and that the loans they must contract do not lead to impoverishment in their subsequent lives. Subsiding interest rates, different methods of taxation are ways to avoid this risk.
All in all I look forward to receiving your conclusions on this matter. So I wish you a successful continuation of your work and may you keep fond memories of your Convention in Luxembourg.