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With Bologna in Mind and the Sword in the Hand: The German Bachelor/Master Reform Reconsidered

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Abstract

Since the late 1990s, many European countries have adapted their traditional one-cycle curriculum structure in higher education to the two-cycle structure employed in the Anglo-American world. In the large social science literature dealing with this reform phenomenon, the Bologna Process — starting with the 1999 Declaration of Bologna — is identified as the major force of change. Illustrated by the German case, this paper argues that the soft-governance mechanism ‘Bologna’ certainly constitutes an important driver and explanatory factor but cannot fully explain curriculum reform success. It is demonstrated that German state governments used classic tools of government — hard governance via rules and bans — to force higher education institutions to substitute traditional programmes with new Bachelor/Master programmes. This case study might stimulate further research investigating whether this ‘governance by coercion’, which has been neglected in previous research, also played an important role in other Bologna countries in which similar curricular reforms occurred.

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Notes

  1. Data source: HRK (2010). Throughout this article, reform success is only measured quantitatively (i.e., ‘market share’ of Bachelor/Master programmes at the end of the politically defined target year 2010) and not evaluated qualitatively in the sense of whether the Bachelor/Master structure is ‘better’ (in whatever respect) than the traditional one.

  2. As analysed in detail in Welsh (2004, 367–369) and Toens (2009), the ministries of education at the state level, who regularly meet within the Standing Conference of State Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs (Kultusministerkonferenz), were part of a strong ‘advocacy coalition’ of different actors (HRK/German Rectors’ Conference, German Science Council, the think tank Centrum für Hochschulentwicklung and others), who — for various reasons — had a strong interest in making the introduction of the Bachelor/Masters structure a policy success.

  3. See also Krücken (2007, 190) who notes: ‘Only a few years ago, universities, professors and their associations were mostly openly critical of the Bachelor and Master scheme.’

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Robert H. Cox, Jeroen Huisman, Klaus Kirchner, Herbert Obinger, Jennifer Rontganger and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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  1. Institute of Political Science, University of Bremen, Linzer Str. 9a, Bremen, D-28359, Germany

    Karsten Mause

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Mause, K. With Bologna in Mind and the Sword in the Hand: The German Bachelor/Master Reform Reconsidered. High Educ Policy 26, 325–347 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/hep.2013.4

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