A new survey has found that American graduate schools are increasingly aware of the ambitious reforms that universities in 46 nations are making to conform to an agreement signed in Bologna, Italy, in 1999—reforms that center on making three-year undergraduate degrees standard. But the survey shows that many graduate-school admissions offices in the United States have not decided whether to treat the three-year degrees as equivalent to the four-year degrees earned at American colleges.
The survey, by the Institute of International Education, was released as education ministers from the 46 countries gather at the Catholic University of Louvain, in Belgium, this week to assess progress in what is known as the Bologna Process. The goal of the process is to create, by next year, a European Higher Education Area that would let more than 19 million students and 1.5 million staff members move easily among 4,000 higher-education institutions. Degree programs that historically varied in duration from country to country—or, in some countries, had no fixed length—are being organized into a framework based on a three-year undergraduate degree.
Results of the survey, conducted in August and September, appear in a new briefing paper, “Three-Year Bologna-Compliant Degrees: Responses From U.S. Graduate Schools.” The survey includes responses representing 167 programs at 120 institutions. “In order to admit European students, U.S. universities must either recognize the equivalency of three-year Bologna-compliant European undergraduate degrees—a key traditional measure was the reliance on a four-year bachelor’s degree or its equivalent—or identify other factors to weigh when considering an application,” the paper says.
The paper says that the more than 84,000 students from the countries taking part in the Bologna Process “represent 13 percent of the total international student population in the U.S., including degree, nondegree, and intensive English students, as well as those on academic training.”
More than half of the survey respondents said their institutions “had an official policy in place to guide the admissions response to three-year Bologna-compliant degrees; within this group, a third tended to view three-year Bologna-compliant degrees as equivalent to U.S. four-year degrees, and another third decided equivalency on a case-by-case basis,” the paper said. It added that respondents “felt that the applicant’s preparation for study in the specific field remained a much more important factor in academic faculty decisions than degree length.”
The findings echo those of earlier surveys by the Council of Graduate Schools, in the United States. In 2005 and 2006, the council surveyed its members about the Bologna Process and found that in the span of that year the percentage of members who said they would not accept the three-year degrees declined from 29 percent to 18 percent. But American universities’ acceptance of the three-year degree is no guarantee for would-be European graduate students, says Debra W. Stewart, president of the graduate-schools council. “The way graduate admissions works in America, institutions can say they will consider applicants with three-year degrees, but that does not mean they will be selected,” she says. “We have much more of an active selection process here than in Europe.”
American graduate schools have been dealing with students with three-year undergraduate degrees from countries like Britain and India for many years, Ms. Stewart says, and institutions have evolved ways to assess the value of those degrees. “What has happened, in terms of U.S. graduate-admissions practices, is that now there is much more of a willingness to evaluate the degree for equivalency, or simply to look more deeply at the individual and to evaluate the person for equivalency,” she says.
Awareness of the Bologna Process in the American higher-education establishment is being demonstrated this week by a U.S. Department of Education representative at the Bologna conference. But at American institutions in general, the preoccupation among graduate admissions officers is not on Europe, Ms. Stewart says. “Remember that in terms of the overall numbers of students coming to graduate schools in the United States,” she says, “the sending countries in big numbers are really in Asia, not in Europe.”