Is European Higher Education Becoming American or Does an American Only See the USA?

Higher education reforms, like the Bologna Process, are remarkably similar to the U.S. system of higher education. Financing, governance, degree structures, uniform systems of credits, student and faculty mobility, research orientations, closer connections to labor markets, privatization, quality assurance and accreditation, the list seems almost endless. Is this serendipitous, the inevitable consequence of global economic pressures, or the Americanization of higher education? Some tentative answers.

MARVIN LAZERSON is Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Public Policy, CEU and Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. A member of the National Academy of Education and a distinguished educational scholar and teacher, he has taught at Harvard University, Stanford University, and the University of British Columbia. At Penn, he served as Dean of the Graduate School of Education and as the University’s Interim Provost.

His books include: Higher Education and the American Dream (CEU Press, 2010), The Institutions of American Democracy: the Public Schools (Oxford University Press, 2005, with Susan Fuhrman), and The Education Gospel: the Economic Power of Schooling (Harvard University Press, 2004, with W. Norton Grubb).