Trends in the Higher Education: Goals and Consequences of the Lisbon Strategy. Contribution of the PCP, by Rui Namorado Rosa. Brussells 27 May 2008.
The Lisbon strategy stated the purpose of the European Union becoming a World superpower, supported by a dynamic economy based on scientific and technological advantages.
Education and Research should be led into the fold of a continental-wide internal market, subjected to fierce competition among students and researchers, and teaching and research institutions.
Actual measures and instruments were implemented and put in place country by country and at European institutional level. But whereas public expenditure in Education and
Research stagnated as a governments' option, the European private capital sought productive applications overseas and speculative applications at home. As a result, the so
called "knowledge society" ran out of supportive resources and the so called "human capital" is being depleted, instead of multiplying in strength and providing economic achievements and social progress.
The European Union devised a so called European Higher Education Area, an internal market for human resources competing development, obliterating the acquis of humanized
and universally acceded Education. A four pronged plan was put in place. It comprised the Bologna process, initiated with a neutral statement by the founding members of the old
European Iron and Steel Community that, from then on, was abused as pretext for questioning every single aspect and for restructuring the whole of national systems of Higher Education.
It incorporated a lifelong learning concept embedded in the whole Education and Training systems that pretends to deny autonomous professional status to every formal qualification and attainment level, such that any manual or intellectual worker of any level of
specialization is always an unfinished product in an ever changing labour market place. The funding mechanisms and certification tools for promoting the all time wish of mobility for studying abroad were reinforced and perfected, thereby contributing to selecting and concentrating vocations and capabilities into a small number of elected destinations. As the corner stone of this continental edifice, the European Quality Assurance Register sets
teaching and training standards and professional requirements, certifies national agencies and oversees the validation of every qualification.
The outcome of this European system is the irreversible trend to depreciate Education as a public good available as a fundamental right to everyone. Because the purposes in
view are to commodify Education that might become increasingly the object of private business, and to supply cheaply a floating labour force that services the needs of the floating financial market. Professional status is disqualified by countering the professional specialization
and status with a lifelong dependability; social rights to an ever numerous and diverse intellectual proletariat is negated; stability in predictable carriers is eliminated and flexibility of the work-force is enforced. The same system will also supply highly proficient researchers,
managers and cadres, for staffing the top business administrations and the highly performing research and development teams that are disputed at high prices for becoming scarce resources in the fierce competition across the World.
As stated above the European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education (EQAR), or The Register in short, is the corner stone of the European Higher Education Area. It was
launched on the 4th March 2008, following a mandate awarded by the European Council of higher education, replacing the former European Network of Quality Assurance Agencies
(ENQA). The Register has been given the power of controlling de fact the national quality assurance agencies, which are supposed to comply with the European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance (ESG), thereby carrying to federal standards, the former
cooperative role of the ENQA. The Register is founded by four European organisations, two representing higher education institutions (EUA and EURASHE), one the students
unions (ESU), and the quality assurance agencies network (ENQA) itself.
The Bologna Follow-up Group (BFUG) acts as observer. The BFUG is composed of the representatives of the individual member states of the Bologna Process plus the European
Commission; the four founding organizations of the EQAR (European University Association, European Association of Institutions in Higher Education, National Unions of Students in Europe, European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education), and two intergovernmental organisations, namely the Council of Europe and UNESCO's
European Centre for Higher Education (CEPES) seat as consultative members.
The Higher Education Area, rallied around the Bologna process, and commanded by European Quality Assurance Register, becomes a really federal entity.
Teachers unions were kept aside and students associations were given a symbolic role in the process of setting up this Higher Education Area. Universities themselves shared a modest part in this process. The European Commission and the Ministerial Councils played the steering role. But when reading the positions of the European Round Table of Industrialists and the Business Europe (former and UNICE) on Education matters, one can check that the capital inspired and set goals one can clearly realize now.
The increasing demands on education systems to meet the goals set by the Lisbon strategy should require additional funding, which, nevertheless, governments and private sources haven't provided in the proportion of the progress demanded for the qualification of the population and the work-force to higher levels of Education and Training. In many Member States governments are refraining from financing Education any further, and the pressing increase of funding is launched to public debate to be solved. In the meantime, efficient use or available resources and equity of access have deteriorated generally. The working conditions and remuneration of teaching, complementary and auxiliary staff degraded; larger contributions are being extracted from families, including tuition fees and administrative charges, while the access to grants is being withdrawn in exchange for bank loans that are being offered as alternative instead. Enrolment in higher education for the less well-off members of society is becoming increasingly problematic. On the other hand business enterprises don't contribute to a significant extent to the national efforts of Training and Research they were supposed to be keenly supportive of.
The ratio of public to private expenditure in Education varies considerably across the Member States, with private expenditure being relatively important only in Germany, the United Kingdom, Cyprus, Malta and Latvia, where it accounts for up to one fifth of public expenditure, when the European average is one eighth. Notice that such proportion attains less than one third in the US, Korea, Australia and Japan examples the European Commission would like to
emulate.
Public expenditure on Education in the EU-25 was equivalent to about 4.9 % of GDP. Annual expenditure on public and private educational institutions per pupil/student shows that on average of 5 520 Euro was spent per pupil/student (in PPS, in 2003, in the EU-25) as compared to 10 000 in the US and 6 770 in Japan. This average expenditure per student rises between successive education levels, attaining 8 060 Euro for each tertiary student, about 1.9
times higher than spending on each primary school pupil (4 330). This ratio of tertiary to primary expenditure is lower in the EU-25 than in the United States - 2.9 times or in Japan - 2.2 times. This, in the context of an at best comparable global budget, reflects the adverse constraints in resources allocation to higher educations in Europe.
But when looking into the data in finer detail, the average indicators prove of elusive meaning, and a quite different reality emerges. Summing up, one realizes that the flows of resources, students and staff is proceeding in the sense of favouring more developed countries and reinforcing stronger institutions within Europe, in a manner alike to the concentration of capital in corporate business, that free market facilitates. The European Higher Education Area has
come to have as mission to reproduce at accelerate rate unfinished proletarians, on the one hand, and, on the other, class leaders and the clergy of capital, presumed to be unquestionable and definitive.
The US and Japan were the reference targets taken by Lisbon's Agenda. The US having a comparable number of higher education establishments (about 4000 in 2003), of which 125 were "research universities", and just 50 (about one per state on average) detained most of the physical and human research capacities and most of the public funds for research. This, notwithstanding the startling asymmetries, was the "success model" the European Commission had in view.
But since 2000 the World changed a lot, not according to the Lisbon Agenda, though. The reference targets were subverted by the dynamics and strategies of other World actors, namely the "emerging economic powers", while both Japan and the US, in succession, entered in deep and lasting socio-economic crises.
The midterm review of the Lisbon strategy (in 2005) was disappointed, the European Union having not made progress in approaching the reference targets, albeit their own downturns. All the same, the Commission and the Council recommended more of the same. This is having lasting negative economic and social consequences, reflected in worsening working and living conditions across the continent.
Among the emergent powers, the R.P. of China has exhibited the highest sustained rate of growth, having already become the largest Education system in the World (data from 2006).
The rate of ingress in higher education attained 21% of the huge population reaching access age; the number of doctorate degrees attained 34 000 (exceeded by the US only). The part of the PIB affected to education raised to 4% and public expense per student has grown at 10% a year.
This exceptional growth is supported and feeds the equally exceptional growth of the national product. The World has quickly become multi-polar and the competition for the best students and researchers, which are becoming scarce in the light of ever demanding technological and management necessities and of the growing inefficiency of the educational systems in the West, has grown fiercely.
Western universities have always pretended to capture students from overseas, including the former colonies, and to contract the best performing foreign students and researchers. Besides the UK and the US, that first engaged in that "brain trade", several other countries have followed that path, and the European Union openly promotes that goal set by its Ministers' Council in 2002.
By importing raw-materials, manufactured goods and "brains", and by exporting equipments, technology and managers, the Western countries have tried to secure the centre of the global productive apparatus and sustain the Third World periphery at bay. However, this strategy is
being confronted with the material and human resources, the increasing accomplishments and the political will of the "emerging economies", that don't limit themselves at being submissive. More deeply, Western countries not any longer compete for economic trade and labour-force advantages solely, but fundamentally for brain-power to make good for their own decaying qualifying capacities and to rescue their decadent domestic Education systems that have become increasingly deprived of working means and inefficient. The neoliberal doctrine, by commodifying everything in an all embracing market place, is intrinsically depriving the capitalist system from the ability of reproducing the human capital it requires for its survival, thereby threatening to dictate its own doom.
Our analysis of the current trends in Europe is endorsed by the course of events observed in Portugal since the year 2000. One should mention a grievous decoupling of public financing for teaching and for research, combined with a diminishing public financing for teaching ends; the hasten restructuring of teaching programs, forced by law since 2006 to bring them "in line with the Bologna process", in fact outpacing the possibility of democratic conciliation of pedagogic analysis and options; the hurried ongoing restructuring of public institutions of higher education,
forced by law in 2007 and to be accomplished within one years' time, undoing the collegial democratic governance put in place for the past twenty years, and inductive of the adoption of the private status; the dissolution in 2006 of the national council for the evaluation of the higher
education system, in place for the past ten years, to give room to a still to be national agency of governmental inspiration.
It is clear the political determination of the government in reducing the public effort and responsibility regarding access to higher Education, in the continuous attempt to
withdrawing fundamental rights from the people, and to privatize Education and serve capital interests.
The people do not comply with this enforced course of events, not withstanding the manipulation exerted by capital, by every means, including governmental policies
and European directives. A massive March of Indignation, called for a common platform of the Portuguese teachers' trade unions, gathered one hundred thousand professionals from all levels of Education and all parts of the country, in Lisbon, on the 8th March; it was an impressive demonstration of the unsubmissive attitude and bargaining capacity of those more directly responsible for implementing policies. The way forward is to resist and defend the public School.
Capitalism is failing the Lisbon strategy. It will miss its hegemonic goals at World level. But more than anything else, it is failing the interests and the future well-being of peoples in Europe.