Europe wants you. Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, and other countries are keen to grab a bigger share of the world's nomadic student population. And increasing competition for foreign students is, ironically, contributing to growing cooperation at the local, national, and international levels to make the hodgepodge of degree programs across Europe mutually understandable and compatible.

Restructuring in higher education has been building up for about a decade, becoming more concerted since the Bologna Declaration was signed two years ago by 29 countries -- the 15 members of the European Union (EU) and 14 others. The declaration encompasses all disciplines, from the physical and social sciences to architecture and law, and has a target compliance date of 2010. The most heated debate in the declaration concerns the implementation of bachelor's/master's systems modeled on those in the UK and US. The declaration also calls for creating cross-border credit and degree accreditation systems and boosting the reputation of European higher education in the international eye.
Internationalization of higher education, says Corry Klugkist of Nuffic, an agency that recruits foreign students to the Netherlands, "broadens the outlook, thus raising the quality. It creates links with the future leaders of different parts of the world and, of course, in the long run, the economic relations are expected to benefit from these contacts." Educating foreigners enriches the host country academically, culturally, politically, and financially, the thinking goes. In some fields, including physics, it provides sorely needed students.
Over the past decade, it's become commonplace for students to study in another EU country for a few months. More recently, the EU has seen an influx of students from Eastern Europe and the Baltic countries, and now some countries are courting students, especially from Asia and South America.
To draw students, countries advertise their education systems, offer stipends, pass laws to ease visa and work restrictions, and help foreign students settle in. The French government, for example, set up EduFrance in 1998 to recruit students and follow up with house hunting and other services. And study programs in English are popping up all over: The Netherlands has more than 500 degree programs in English, Finland 300, Germany 150, and France 80.
Without a doubt, English-speaking countries have the advantage. The UK has 16% of the world's globetrotting students, leading Europe, and lagging only the US, which has 32%, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD; see figure). The UK is also one of the few countries in Europe that charges tuition-- low at €1050 (about $1500) a year for EU citizens -- and to reap immediate financial gain from foreign students, whose fees bring in €8 billion annually and provide a sizeable fraction of some departments' budgets.
In June 1999, the day before the Bologna Declaration was signed, Prime Minister Tony Blair launched a campaign to boost the number of foreigners in UK universities and vocational schools: "The targets are a significant increase in the UK's share of the fee-paying market for international students in English-speaking countries," he said. Australia, notably, has stepped up education marketing and is seen as a key competitor.

AMBASSADORS OF CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY

But probably the country that is most aggressively wooing foreign students is Germany. In a 1999 paper, "Qualified in Germany," Max Huber, vice president of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), wrote that Germany "is missing important opportunities to be politically, culturally, and economically influential. Our universities and research institutes are likewise lacking the scientific and academic strength of excellent foreigners. It therefore lies in our national interest to strengthen Germany's position in the worldwide higher education market."
After getting off to a late start, Germany is introducing many measures to entice foreigners, especially scientists. They include government funding for bachelor's and master's degree programs -- more widely recognized outside Germany than the Diplom-Arbeit, which that takes five or six years and is roughly equivalent to a US master's. Some 600 such programs have sprung up around the country so far. Research and Education Minister Edelgard Bulmahn announced recently that laws will soon be changed to make it easier for foreign graduates to stay and work in Germany.
And this past February, Bulmahn announced that DM170 million ($77 million) -- a windfall from a government auction of frequency spectrum use -- will fund scientists from abroad to set up research groups in Germany. "There must be an end to 'brain drain' in Germany. Instead, we want to have 'brain gain,'" she said. "Germany must become more international. Only science and research of the highest level can ensure our future."
Yet another development is the International Max Planck Research Schools (see box), which aim to give PhD students more guidance and networking opportunities than is typical in Germany. Half of the IMPRS scholarship money is tagged for foreigners.
All this recruiting is limited to neither students nor foreigners: France and Germany, among others, have new fellowships for postdocs and faculty -- including returning citizens. And France, for one, despite having less brain drain than Germany or the UK, has offices in the US to help French scientists find jobs back home. The flux should go both ways, says Vincent Courtillot, director of research in France's research ministry. "And it should continue at all levels -- from the youngest students to professors. People learn another culture and language. It generates new ideas, links, and tolerance. And when they go back, they should be ambassadors."

BACHELOR'S PROBLEMS

More than anything else, it's the internationalization of higher education that led to the Bologna Declaration. With university exchanges so popular, it's become necessary to compare systems that are often opaque to outsiders. The declaration's intellectual birthplace is France: In 1998, Claude Allegre, then the minister for education, research, and technology, brought his colleagues from Italy, Germany, and the UK together at the Sorbonne on the occasion of its 800th anniversary, and they penned a declaration that formed the basis of the Bologna Declaration a year later. That may be Allegre's most far-reaching legacy; he was sacked last year.
"At the moment, it's a jungle of different types of study programs and diplomas," says Lewis Purser, a program manager at the Association of European Universities (CRE) in Geneva. "In general, since the Bologna Declaration was signed in 1999, there is much greater awareness of the need to have coherent reform. Before, each country was doing things in its own way, in its own time."
The plan is to follow "3-5-8" schedules, so that it takes about three years to earn a bachelor's degree, five for a master's, and eight for a PhD, making it easy to switch fields or universities, or to return to school later in life -- a new idea in Europe. Shorter than in most of Europe now, the bachelor's degree is supposed to reduce the high drop-out rate by serving as a stopping point that prepares graduates for jobs. With higher education free in most of Europe, the motivation for governments is clear: save money both by reducing the number of years students are subsidized and by herding them into the job market faster.
In fact, dovetailing with the job market is something that still needs to be sorted out. "Bachelor's degrees are not very popular in Finland," says Tapio Markkanen, the Finnish. "The problem is, How do we design our first degrees so that they become labor-market relevant? We don't see the solution yet."
Hendrik Ferdinande, a physicist at the University of Gent, Belgium, and coordinator of the European Physics Education Network, which is comparing physics curricula in more than 100 departments in two dozen countries, agrees: "For many of us, it's a big question mark how industry will react when we deliver the first bachelor's degree on the continent." Will industry hire people holding only a bachelor's degree? Will that lead to a shortage of more highly trained workers? And there's a twist: One fear is that governments will cut off student subsidies beyond the bachelor's level. No one knows what will happen, says Ferdinande. "But industry is much more supple than universities. It will adapt. There are still fears, because it's something new."
And, while countries where degrees take a long time fear switching to the bachelor's will degrade their education, places with shorter-duration programs worry that their degrees won't be recognized as high quality. Science and engineering students in England, for example, can choose to go straight to a four-year master's degree, which about a third of all physics students do. "Our worry is that the 'mphys' is seen as an inferior qualification. We are sitting uncomfortably on the fence," says the Institute of Physics' Philip Diamond.

REFORMS AND RISKS

So far, Italy has made the most drastic reforms. This fall, the country is switching wholesale to a 3-5-8 structure from its traditional higher education system, under which the laurea was supposed to take four to six years, but often dragged out longer. The number of students has exploded since the 1970s, and so has the drop-out rate, to around 60%, says Paolo Blasi, a nuclear physicist and vice president of the CRE. "In the new scheme, we expect that at least 70% who attend will graduate. This is important from a psychological point of view." But, he adds, "if we really want to improve the level of education, we need more resources."
The Netherlands and others are also switching to a bachelor's/master's system. Elsewhere, as in Germany and, to a lesser extent, France, bachelor's and master's degrees are being introduced in parallel with the traditional systems. Other countries are still just talking.
One danger is that universities will make only window-dressing changes, says Guy Haug, a CRE delegate and active participant in the Bologna process. Some universities start out making superficial changes "to be in line with the trend or the law -- but later they actually change the curriculum," he says. But the biggest threat to higher education in Europe, Haug says, is "trans-national" education -- by which degrees are typically offered over the Internet and are not subject to local regulations. Such degrees tend to be expensive, and it's hard to gauge their quality, he says. "Is it bonafide education or just a commercial venture?"
Students, for their part, support the Bologna Declaration with some hesitation. "Many countries have long tunnel-like educations," says Jacob Henricson, who is studying political science in Umeå, Sweden, and is active in the National Unions of Students in Europe (ESIB), an organization representing student unions in 32 countries. "If you choose to stop, you have nothing to show for it. We don't like that. We want to raise the quality in general. We want a credit system, quality assurance, and accreditation." So far, so good. But ESIB, in its Student Göteborg Declaration released this past March, says the Bologna Declaration "failed to address the social implications the process has on students. It is the governments' responsibility to guarantee that all citizens have equal access to higher education, regardless of their social background." Students are not just consumers, explains Henricson. "We have fears that more and more countries are talking about introducing fees."
In the past six months, says Henricson, "there's been a step forward: Students are being included in the process." Henricson was among the student representatives at a meeting in Salamanca, Spain in late March, where educators took stock of progress and laid out recommendations to education ministers. ESIB will also be present at the ministers' meeting this month in Prague.
Intense discussion about the implementation of the Bologna Declaration continues at ministerial, regional, and university levels. Says Torsten Kälvemark, who oversees international developments in higher education for the Swedish government, "Any country with an old-fashioned or peculiar degree structure will run the risk of having problems in relation to other countries and its students may suffer when their degrees are not understood by foreign employers. If we want to create a competitive common European labor market a common degree structure will be essential. One can sometimes hear dissenting voices, but on the whole, it has been a remarkably swift change of mind in many quarters."