Headed towards Bologna? An update on degree “travel time”

Last updated on: June 12, 2015 at 4:33 pm by Jane the Actuary

Headed towards Bologna? An update on degree “travel time” 2015-06-12T16:33:25-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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In my post the other day on European universities, I mentioned that

Students are also expected to plunge into their major requirements immediately. It’s assumed that your high school coursework has been of sufficient rigor that you don’t need a set of “general education” courses in composition, the humanities, and the sciences — you’re assumed to have learned that already.

In fact, as a result of the Bologna Process, a set of agreements among European countries to standardize their degrees (see Wikipedia), the standard “travel time” to a Bachelor’s Degree is 3 years, not the 4 in the United States — as a result of the expectation that students have learned “general education” topics well enough in high school that they don’t need a repetition in college. (I use “travel time” without necessarily knowing if it’s meaningful outside the context of actuarial exams, but within the context of those exams, it refers to the time it takes to complete the exams.)

This is, of course, quite different than in the U.S. — but here’s data point that I was unaware of: AP exams and community college transfer credits are starting to have a meaningful impact. From an Inside Higher Ed article (linked to in facebook by an old grad school friend), humanities departments are seeing drops in enrollment. For instance

One in five students come to Ohio State having completed a full year’s worth of course work, either through Advanced Placement courses or community colleges, eroding revenue from what has long been the bread and butter of colleges of arts and sciences: general education courses that are required of all students, no matter their major or college.

One in five isn’t huge — it’s only 1/5th of the way towards a three-year degree as the norm — but it is more than I expected. And yet the context for this piece of information is an article on infighting among departments about whether humanities departments are being treated fairly by the university in terms of finances and enrollment.

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