Our first order of business with Katz and Dodds was to simply ask them how their trip went. In particular, we wanted to know what they discovered and whether or not they found anything innovative or exciting about higher education in the EU (more on that later). Katz started with some context on why, to begin with, he and Dodds took this trip.

Katz referred to some of the writings of IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano on multinational corporations and 21^st Century notions about globalization. Palmisano’s writings spurred Katz to think more about how EDUCAUSE could increase its global footprint. After all, EDUCAUSE does have a substantial membership outside of North America. "It seemed incredibly important to explore how EDUCAUSE needs to position itself for increasing participation in a global IT community," Katz noted.

Getting back to Katz and Dodds, a key element of their EU travels was to get a better understanding of the Bologna Process, which is also referred to as the Bologna Declaration and the Bologna Accords. The Bologna Process is certainly not a new topic of discussion on the global higher education scene. Its declaration was first published in 1999. Dodds found, however, that educators in North America, including himself (prior to the trip), are not very informed about it. At the EDUCAUSE session, Dodds took a quick straw vote from the 300 to 400 people sitting in the audience and found that a relatively small fraction actually knew about the Bologna Process. He then, of course, presented a brief educational overview about it. "Just getting Americans to be aware of the fact that there are things happening outside of the U.S. higher education scene was a good win that came out of the talk," he added.

As noted by Katz and Dodds, the reforms include building a common framework for academic degrees throughout Europe that is similar to the bachelors/masters/doctoral system of the U.S. Within that goal there are other objectives that extend the overall Process into a more complex and lofty reform movement. Thus, the Bologna Process is also about quality assurance issues and building a credible and compatible credit and transferability system, so that students attending EU colleges and universities can become more mobile in their academic pursuits. In addition, the extension of the Bologna Process objectives deals with many of the same issues U.S. institutions deal with today, notably making higher education more accountable, accessible and affordable (similar to the Spellings Commission).

When talking about how the Bologna Process is actually moving forward, the short description from both Katz and Dodds sounded very much like a slowly-but-surely scenario with great potential and a need to move forward at a quicker pace.

Katz explained that many of the conversations he and Dodds had with European educators about the Bologna Process were associated with the notion of EU institutions sharpening their global competitiveness. "They are very much trying to grab, if you will, the graduate students who are coming from Europe to study in the U.S. universities, grab the graduate students who are coming from the Middle East to the U.S. to pursue graduate studies, grab the Chinese students who are looking for access to Western higher education," said Katz. "So I think their position is as a respectful but increasingly canny competitor for U.S. universities."

Dodds said that his non-empirical "folksy analysis" of the Bologna Process reveals that there is an unevenness with regard to implementation and variations concerning any sense of urgency among EU countries and institutions. Katz mentioned how Europe is still very much a set of distinct nations with the experiences in terms of growth and spending still quite variable country by country. "It (the Bologna Declaration) is an important goal for people to work toward," added Dobbs. "A number of institutions are almost there now; others are still sort of thinking whether they ever will do it. But over time - maybe it is half of a generation, maybe it is a generation - we are going to see some of those institutions become much more formidable competitors with U.S. higher education."

Getting back to our early question to Katz and Dodds: What did they discover in European institutions that could be considered innovative or exciting?

These institutions are achieving their goals through a "strong executive-level leadership with vision and guts to make the structural, administration and academic changes that are required to implement Bologna," Dodds continued. "They have built teams around that; they have taken some risks; and, to a certain degree, both are using technology to support that."

Katz noted that SURF operates in a small, homogenous country and is well-funded and organized, with a tradition of working collaboratively. "You have a very top-down opportunity in the Netherlands that you do not have in practically any other country I have ever been to, including the U.S. The SURF organization has far more influence on the directions taken in Dutch higher education than EDUCAUSE has, or even aspires to have. The good news is that when you have a culture that is collaborative in this way, you also have a concentrated amount of national funding. Those two qualities put together really adds up to the capacity to innovate and to assimilate innovation at a rate much faster than anywhere else."

While these are all great examples (and there are certainly many more) of how progress is being made inside the European higher education community, many European institutions have a set of challenges that are catalysts for retrogression, which is not unusual in any higher education system worldwide.

Increasing access to higher education in Europe is driven much more exclusively by government policy and funding than it is in the U.S. While the European ministries subsidize student enrollments, they also tell higher education that they must be less reliant on the government’s purse strings (something that is happening in all developed countries). Katz explained that European universities have "a tremendous amount of regulatory baggage." For example, professorial salaries are typically set by government regulation or law, as well as hiring and promotional decisions. "On one hand, they are being told to be more independent, to raise more money on their own. On the other hand, they have a set of regulations, both internal and government-imposed, that tie their hands."

Another challenge being faced by European institutions deals with changes in population demographics, which is also happening in the U.S. Katz explained that the proportion of the European population that is college age or near college age is smaller than the number of people who are turning 60 or older. With a growing aging population, government funding for education starts to take a back seat to the government funding of more social services for people entering their retirement years.

We believe that the dissemination of informational reporting and discovery that has a strong correlation to the globalization of higher education theme will continue to increase as the world continues to get smaller and flatter. The work of Katz and Dodds is a great addition to a body of work that is gaining importance rapidly with institutions globally.