Written by: Melanie Gottlieb, Deputy Directory, American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO)
On September 18, 2017, AACRAO hosted the 2nd symposium focused on the U.S. perspective on the three-year Bologna-compliant bachelor’s degree. This gathering brought together more than 30 leaders from across U.S. higher education, including representatives from institutions, professional credential evaluators, and other key stakeholders to explore the current perspectives of U.S. Higher education on this as of yet unresolved issue.
Background
In June 1999, 29 European Ministers signed the Bologna Declaration with the goal of establishing the European Area of Higher Education by 2010 and promoting the European system of higher education worldwide. In 2006, to assess the impact of the Bologna Declaration in the U.S., AACRAO hosted a symposium, “The Impact of Bologna and Three-Year Degrees on U.S. Admissions.” Participants included representatives from Germany, the UK, and Australia, as well as several sectors of the U.S. higher education community.
The context in 2006 included:
- The U.S. was just beginning to see more graduates applying to U.S. graduate schools with three-year Bologna-compliant degrees.
- U.S. institutions were grappling with nuts and bolts issues like the numbers of years a degree represents and differences in degree structures from country to country within Europe.
- Some in the U.S. higher education community thought discussions of three-year degrees should not just focus on Europe, but should also include countries such as India and Australia.
The overall conclusion of the 2006 symposium was that there was not one policy on three-year degrees across the United States because higher education is so decentralized and each institution is so autonomous, which reflects the diversity of U.S. higher education.
The 2017 Symposium:
The purposes of this symposium were to:
- Assess what has changed over the past 11 years, since the first AACRAO symposium.
- Determine if there is a U.S. perspective on three-year Bologna-compliant bachelor’s degrees.
- Identify outstanding questions that still need to be answered.
This symposium consisted of three panel discussions that examined the degrees from multiple perspectives: The Professional Credential Evaluation Perspective, The Institutional Perspective: Evaluation for Admission, and The Employment Perspective. After these panels, attendees participated in working groups followed by a group discussion of the key issues throughout the symposium.
Panel 1: The Professional Credential Evaluation Perspective
Credential evaluation experts from Educational Credential Evaluators (ECE), Foreign Credits, and SpanTran shared their perspectives on Bologna-compliant degrees. Key takeaways from these colleagues included that from a credential evaluation perspective, three years are not equal to four years. While evaluation services take a multiplicity of factors such as level of education, who offers it, and the purpose of education in the country where it was received into an evaluation, the number of years of education remains an important characteristic. It is important to note that an evaluation in this context is a comparative assessment of the education that has been earned against the U.S. education system. Credential evaluators are not decision makers; their evaluations are solely advisory. They see their role as providing information to end users who apply this information and make decisions. The information gathered and the evaluations are the same, regardless of the stated purpose. Evaluations for employment, immigration, admissions, or transfer credit do not essentially differ, and evaluation services tend not to change their evaluations dependent on purpose, since they have no control over what will be done with that evaluation once it leaves their offices.
Finally, the group concluded that communicating the evaluation conclusion is extremely important. The agency doing the evaluation must carefully word the evaluation report so the end user understands the conclusion. It is then the end user’s responsibility to apply this information.
Panel 2: The Institutional Perspective: Evaluation for Admission
Representatives from three large state institutions—the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of Texas at Austin—shared their perspectives on three-year Bologna-compliant bachelor’s degrees and discussed how their universities consider students with these degrees.
A major challenge in graduate admission in the U.S., and at these three institutions in particular, is that graduate admission decisions are highly decentralized. These major state institutions have tens of thousands of students, with thousands of graduate students spread across more than 100 different departments, and a significant percentage of international students. While undergraduate admissions tends to be highly centralized and managed by the admissions departments, the graduate admissions processes are decided upon by the academic units within the graduate schools.
For international students applying for admission to a graduate program, these universities all have a function that prepares in-house preadmission evaluations of the international students, which includes assessing degree equivalency. These evaluations typically include a credential evaluation and a report, which are furnished to individual graduate departments to make the final admission decision. The sequence of these evaluations differ slightly, and that can have a tremendous impact on admissions policies, since the admissions office could conceivably put forward only candidates that meet their established criteria. At the University of Colorado and the University of Texas, the admissions office first prepares evaluations for all international applications and forwards this information to the graduate departments so they can make admission decisions. At the University of Illinois the order is reversed: the departments first decide which international students they want to admit and evaluations are then performed on those students. The admissions department has far less control in this circumstance. But in all instances, the final admission decision for graduate students resides with the departments.
The participants acknowledged that graduate admission policies have evolved over time. At the time of the first symposium, their institutions lacked clear policies regarding degree equivalency for international applicants to graduate programs. Essentially, every international application was handled on a case-by-case basis. However, this resulted in inconsistency, frequent questions, and dissatisfaction from applicants, faculty, and staff. Since then, institutions have worked to develop policies to make evaluations easier and more consistent. All three institutions have become more transparent in their policies, and in general require some equivalent to a four-year bachelor’s degree; however, admitting departments are allowed to make exceptions, and often do, especially in the case of education systems that are 16 years in length when combining primary, secondary, and initial post-secondary education.
Despite polices, graduate departments have made exceptions. While admitting students into graduate programs with three-year degrees has at times been controversial, the experience of these panelists is that students admitted into their graduate programs with Bologna-compliant three-year degrees have done very well. The European education model emphasizes depth in the subject. As a result, those who graduate with a Bologna-compliant three-year degree in a particular subject have a depth of knowledge in that subject and are able to perform well in graduate programs. In addition, Europe’s Bologna Process has been predicated on quality assurance mechanisms at the national level, area-wide level, institutional level, and program level. As a result, Bologna-compliant degrees have an undergirding of quality assurance. While there is still not complete consistency, and there are differences in implementation and quality in Europe, there is nonetheless a focus on and a commitment to quality, which is reflected in the performance of students.
It is important to note that developing policies and wrestling with admission decisions for students with Bologna-compliant degrees is just one challenge faced by admissions leaders from major universities. Students from Europe represent only a small number of international students in the U.S.; the number of international students from China, India, and other Asian and Middle Eastern countries is far greater.
Panel 3: The Employment Perspective
These panelists shared perspectives on the role of three-year Bologna-compliant degrees related to employment and immigration issues. Nancy Katz of Evaluation Service does evaluations for immigration and employment processing. Lynn Shotwell of the Council for Global Immigration is deeply engaged in a host of issues related to immigration.
The panelists shared the perspective that employers are looking more closely than ever at credential evaluations. The whole process is largely a mystery to most employers, who generally outsource their evaluations to third-party services. Both employers and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) are increasing the scrutiny of evaluations and are asking more questions. Questions are about the legitimacy of the evaluation agency, about a candidate’s education, and more. Also, it is not uncommon to get comments back from companies or the USCIS indicating that they disagree with an evaluation.
For employment purposes, the most important part of the credential evaluation process is determining if a degree was awarded, what degree was awarded from which institution, and a determination if the degree is equivalent to a U.S. degree. The degree of flexibility that can be offered in a university admission decision cannot always be tolerated for licensure decisions. When a U.S. educational institution accepts foreign three-year diploma holders into a master’s program in a regulated profession, there are sometimes issues when the student applies for licensure. They may lack the necessary qualifications based on their foreign three-year bachelor’s degree, and there can also be licensing issues that arise for students who return to their home country.
Additional political considerations around treaties such as NAFTA that have specific recognition guidance and other European and UN efforts around mutual recognition policies add complexity to the discussion and will need further exploration.
Conclusions and Next Steps
Participants see tremendous autonomy and diversity across U.S. higher education. They do not see three-year degrees—even from Bologna-compliant institutions—as equivalent to four-year U.S. bachelor’s degrees, but there may be factors that would cause an institution to consider a student for a graduate program. Factors include the number of years of secondary education, the total number of credits and class hours, the amount of work experience, and the ability to admit a student on a provisional basis. Decentralization and institutional autonomy are foundational aspects of US Higher education. This means that they U.S. perspective on this issue will always be fractured. Additionally, while this symposium is focused on the U.S. perspective on Bologna-compliant three-year degrees, the tremendous variability across Europe in countries, institutions, and degrees remains a concern for the U.S.
The full report, along with related work, will be available in early 2018. Symposium participants continue to be engaged with a number of identified next steps, including but not limited to continued discussion of standards, education of end users, clarification of the function of an evaluation as an advisory opinion, and collaborations with the regulated professions. AACRAO seeks to chart a path forward to communicate the complexity of the issues to U.S. institutions and their distributed graduate departments, our credential evaluation colleagues overseas, and, most importantly, to European students who would like to pursue graduate education in the U.S. In this world of increasing mobility, these conversations will become more and more important.
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