Marike Faber

Same Voyage, Different Routes? The course of the Netherlands and Denmark to a ‘European model’ of quality assurance

The European dimension in quality assurance grows and glows. In this article, we try to relate the European objectives, as stated in the various European initiatives, to the national quality assurance systems of The Netherlands and Denmark. This will be done by looking closer at the objectives regarding quality assurance and internationalisation, and analysing the national quality assurance mechanisms in the light of recent developments. Are these two, apparently quite similar, countries taking different courses in the same voyage? One of the results is that while The Netherlands sees accreditation as the new cure, solving all problems with which higher education is confronted, Denmark takes a different route, paving their path for mutual recognition in accordance with the Lisbon Recognition Convention. Correspondingly, there are two different approaches to the same challenge. At present it seems that the routes, and maybe even the voyages, are diverging.

A matching activity when entering higher education: ongoing guidance for the students or efficiency instrument for the school?

ABSTRACT In order to lower dropout rates and stimulate student success in higher education, the Dutch government implemented a new law demanding that every higher education institute offer a matching activity to applying students. This article evaluates how students and teachers experience this matching activity. Data were collected in a Dutch university of applied sciences through questionnaire (students: n = 1711, teachers: n = 52) and interview research (students: n = 136, teachers, n = 36). Results provide insights into useful and improvable aspects of the matching procedure. It also reveals a tension related to a ‘conflicting perspective’: the matching activity can be used as a selection-oriented instrument or as a guidance instrument, which leads to different perceptions on the effectiveness of the instrument.

European Degree Structure and National Reform

In the last decade, two types of cooperation in European higher education, to with the intergovernmental Bologna Process and the more supranational EU initiatives, seem to complement each other in the construction of a ‘single space’ of European higher education. The ministers responsible for higher education, taking part in the Bologna Process early in 2010 inaugurated the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). We will contend that this was mainly based on a generous reading of the ‘pays politique’ of regulations, while in the ‘pays reel’ (Neave, 2002) of higher education institutions, students and graduates the EHEA is still in the making. For this book, we look at the degree reforms in European higher education in the context of the Bologna Process. This initiative gave higher education cooperation in the European nation states a new face as from 1999. One of the main strategic objectives of the Bologna Process is to increase the compatibility–in more operational terms, similarity–of European higher education systems in general and national degree structures in particular in order to make the European Higher Education Area a space in which student and graduate mobility will be increased.

U-Map, University Activity Profiles in Practice

There is a large number of higher education institutions in Europe and their number and character are changing constantly. Expanding demand for higher education and changing national and European policies regarding the role of higher education and higher education institutions in society have contributed to a growing diversity of higher education providers and a growing need for information on who providers are and what services they provide. Given the overload of data on the internet and other information sources, there is a clear need for instruments that present the information on institutional activity in a meaningful and concise way. A growing number of transparency tools intend to do just that – a prominent example being the national and international rankings. Rankings try to capture the vertical external diversity in the field, but in doing so they have been subjected to heavy criticism as they reduce the information to simple league tables that do little or no justice to the complexity of what a higher education institution is and what it does. Rankings only concentrate on a restricted number of institutions and a very limited set of their various activities. In 2009, an alternative approach for enhancing transparency was presented: U-Map. U-Map is an instrument – a classification tool – designed for describing the horizontal external diversity while presenting a much broader view. The instrument was created after an intense and interactive process involving many of higher education’s stakeholders. A prototype of U-Map was presented in 2009. Since then, this classification instrument has been implemented in four countries, with additional countries to follow.