Replicating Bologna process for APAC ‘incredibly difficult’

Asia-Pacific universities can achieve more by forging limited consortia of like-minded institutions than by signing “zombie agreements” with one another, but leaders warn that an APAC version of the Bologna Process would be “a lot of effort for very little reward”.

Collaboratively minded universities should seek a middle ground between bilateral agreements and pan-regional pacts, Times Higher Education’s Asia Universities Summit has heard. Universitas Indonesia rector Heri Hermansyah said leaders should avoid “sleeping” agreements that elicited no action.

But “multi-entity” agreements among institutions with common interests could ease bureaucracy and foster “impactful” collaboration, speeding up student and staff exchanges without any need for “one-by-one” signings, he said.

Member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) have been working to harmonise their higher education systems since the 2015 signing of the Kuala Lumpur Declaration on Higher Education. A 2022 road map outlined a vision for a common qualifications framework and quality assurance regime, including mutual recognition of credentials, a digital credit transfer system and a collective approach to higher education mobility.

The vision moved a step closer with the 2024 Joint Declaration on the Common Space in Southeast Asian Higher Education. However, progress to date has fallen well short of the cooperation achieved through Europe’s Bologna Process.

Sunway University president Sibrandes Poppema said Bologna had bolstered student mobility and research, but only because of the strong organisation and funding provided through the European Union. Replicating its success across Asean would be “incredibly difficult”, he said, and adding Oceania to the fold would be all but impossible.

Poppema said universities could achieve many of the benefits of a pan-regional pact – including student exchanges, joint research and pooling of administrative efforts – by banding together in consortia of five to 10 institutions. “The good thing is, you don’t need all that much politics to enable it,” he told the summit. “You can do it without anybody paying anything.”

Poppema said “just about every university” in his native Netherlands had joined such consortia in Europe. “[It] achieves what you wanted to achieve, which is collaboration.”

University of Sydney vice-chancellor Mark Scott said huge accords could be very unwieldy. “The broader the net, the greater the complexity, the longer time it will take to resolve it, and – arguably – the less you’ll have to show for it at the end,” he told the summit.

“The real problem we’ve got here is that there isn’t an Asia-Oceania union. There’s not an obvious convening group. A lot of good…can come here through a commitment to internationalisation, to student exchange and student mobility, to research partnerships. And you don’t need some benign presence to put a lot of cash on the table to make it work.”

Scott said there were plenty of memoranda of understanding (MOUs) but relatively few that elicited real action. “The best ones are those where something already exists,” he said. “Some level of agreement around strategic alignment is a forerunner to success of any of these arrangements.

“After all is said and done, there’s always a lot more said than done. I suspect fewer is better – fewer, deeper, more thoughtfully prepared and engaged – rather than a volume play.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com