Towards an Open Higher Education System in the European Union (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject Business economics - Economic Policy, grade: 1,3, University of Göttingen, language: English, abstract: Proceeding globalization tendencies and increasing competition on the world markets oblige governments to adapt their educational system permanently to the new global challenges. They have to guarantee that their citizens gain all qualifications that are necessary to cope with recent problems in order to meet the increasing demands of economy. Prospective decision-makers are expected to be highly productive, enormously flexible and very sophisticated in terms of linguistic skills and cultural experiences.
Due to the fact, that hardly any education system has ever been completely shut off from outside influences, the European countries decided to meet their educational mandate jointly. So they intensified collaboration and put it on an institutional level. Soon, this new dimension of cooperation resulted in the creation of a European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Apart from the general intention to push ahead with the integration process, European Education Policy aims at strengthening European economy by promoting employability and mobility of human capital. The European education system and its students are expected to be competitive regarding other education systems in the world as well as regarding common markets.
This paper intends to illuminate some aspects of the European education system. The emphasis is especially put on educational migration within Europe expressed by the SOCRATES respectively ERASMUS program and on the Bologna Declaration as the basis of educational collaboration on an institutional level: At the beginning of chapter two, that deals with educational migration in Europe, the development of the European Education Policy is described in brief. Afterwards the development and the main characteristics and objectives of the SOCRATES / ERASMUS program are presented. The last part focuses on the most important aspects of mobility in general and of the SOCRATES / ERASMUS in particular. Here, the critical analysis is mainly limited to concise economic aspect due to the fact, that a total analysis would go beyond the scope of this paper.