Since 1999 European higher education has been engaged in the most radical reform of its 900 years of history. This volume brings together a group of higher education researchers across Europe and looks into the implementation of the Bologna Process in the countries often attributed a peripheral status. In addition to cultural and political issues, the volume pays particular attention to the role of students as well as the changing position of the intellectuals under its impact.

"Based on a workshop held by the Academia Europaea, this collection draws together essays by a number of prominent writers in the field of higher education research." "Taking as its central theme the direction in which national (and international) higher education systems are moving as we approach the 21st century, the book contains both assessments of specific higher education systems and analyses of cross-national trends. It tackles such issues as higher education training, quality assessment and university autonomy, unified/binary higher education systems, confronting changes in the socioeconomic structure, and higher education in an ageing society. The book will be of interest to all those who are concerned with the future of higher education in times of rapid change."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The high level Douro seminars are now a well-established tradition in the annual activities promoted by Hedda, a European consortium of nine centres and ins- tutes devoted to research on higher education, and CIPES, its Portuguese associated centre. At the seminars, each member of a small group of invited researchers presents and discusses an original research-based paper that is revised afterwards taking into account the comments of the participating colleagues. The revised papers form the basis for the annual thematic book published by Springer in the book series called Higher Education Dynamics (HEDY). Paying tribute to the regularity of the seminars, it was decided that the volumes originating from the initiative would be collected in a ‘series in the series’ called the Douro Series. Previous seminars were dedicated to in-depth analyses of different aspects of higher education systems and institutions, including institutional governance, the emergence of managerialism, markets as instruments of public policy, cost-sharing and accessibility of students to higher education and developments in quality assurance. The present volume aims at analysing the change process which the European university is undergoing as a consequence of European integration efforts. In the case of higher education, these have materialised, amongst other things, in the - plementation of the Bologna process, while the Lisbon summit also has important consequences for the university. In March 2000, the Lisbon European Council set the goal for the EU to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based society in the world by 2010.

This book presents a critical analysis of the implementation of the Bologna Process, its achievements and consequences, as well as its failures and lack of convergence problems. Over the last decade the implementation of the Bologna Process, an ambitious reform of European higher education systems, has attracted attention from politicians, academics, students and scholars in higher education policy. Taking Portugal as a case study, the book includes an analysis of the perceptions and the practices, formed at the institutional level in respect of the key objectives laid down at the European level, namely employability, mobility and attractiveness.

In the EC context