No Ordinary Foreign Travel: Epiphanies on Accountability and Access from the Bologna Process

While we in the U.S. stumble around with political and process issues on accountability and mumble slogans about "access" with radar screens that pick up anything and everything, our colleagues in Europe have been working on both issues in remarkable ways. Since 1999, across 46 countries, 23 major languages, 4000 institutions of higher education, and 16 million students, they have addressed our big "A" issues in ways that produce a differential perspective from which we have much to learn. Other countries are following them, and we can't sleep through this.

Seasoned educational researcher Cliff Adelman currently serves as a Senior Associate with the Institute for Higher Education Policy. He came to the U.S. Department of Education on a 1-year fellowship in 1979, was asked to stay, and didn't leave until 2006. During those years, A Nation at Risk (1983) appeared; dissatisfied with the treatment of higher education in that report, Cliff designed the project that subsequently produced Involvement in Learning (1984), served as its amanuensis, wrote the first study of standardized test scores of college graduates, and got blamed for kick-starting the assessment movement in US higher education. Cliff subsequently conducted studies of assessment and testing in the late 1980s, then learned some statistics and programming, and took on the task of editing and analyzing the major national longitudinal studies databases. Nine monographs resulted, the best known of which are Women at Thirtysomething: Paradoxes of Attainment (1991); Women and Men of the Engineering Path (1998); Answers in the Tool Box: Academic Intensity, Attendance Patterns, and Bachelor's Degree Attainment (1999); Moving Into Town-and Moving On: the Community College in the Lives of Traditional-age Students (2005), and The Toolbox Revisited: Paths to Degree Completion from High School Through College(2006). A Parallel Postsecondary Universe: the Certification System in Information Technology, the first study of IT certification, followed in 2000. Cliff says if he'd done nothing else in this period, the Tool Box studies would have been sufficient because they proved that research can make a difference: they've been repeatedly cited in a vast range of policy and other documents. In 2001 Cliff received the Special Merit award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education, and in 2005 he received the Association for Institutional Research's Suslow award for sustained contributions to research on higher education. Dismayed by the Bush administration's indifference to his work, Cliff has since the fall of 2006 written on international matters for IHEP, producing The Bologna Club: What U.S. Higher Education Can Learn from a Decade of European Reconstruction (May 2008), and Learning Accountability from Bologna: a Higher Education Policy-Primer (July 2008). There will be one more Bologna-related document in the series, and two on comparative international data on higher education - all scheduled for 2009.