Abstract
Traditionally, there have been significant differences between Europe and the United States in matters concerning higher education. Generally speaking, in Europe higher education is considered a public service, while in the US it is considered a private matter that is subject to market rules. The consequences of these different approaches are important. Higher education in Europe focuses more on instruction, and in the US on research, especially applied research. Higher education in Europe is more geared towards theory, for developing intellectual abilities, while in the US institutions of higher learning are more practical, and oriented towards job finding. European universities give their students a more broad-based education, while US higher education is more specialised, almost from the start. Lastly, in Europe most universities are public, whereas in the US many institutions rely primarily on private funding, as a result of which on average, higher education is more expensive than in Europe.
Which of the two systems is better? Traditionally, the answer might have been that each system was good and appropriate according to different cultural standards. However, this was before globalisation. Now universities are ranked, and international rankings, such as the QS World University Rankings or the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities, seem to favour the Anglo-Saxon model, especially the US one.
World university rankings might be a point of contention, as not all of their criteria are widely accepted as objective markers of quality. Nevertheless, such overwhelming differences do seem to indicate that Europe lags behind the US in terms of higher education. In any case, this seems to have been one of the objectives in starting the Bologna Process in 1999, as European ministers of education declared that Europe wanted to ‘match the performance of the best performing systems in the world, notably the United States and Asia’ (EC, Education and Training 2011).
In this paper, the author analyses, from a European and a US perspective, the strengths and weaknesses of both systems. The US seems to offer a wider and more diversified range of choice in higher education: on average, more Americans than Europeans attend higher education institutions (6.3 vs. 4 %), and US universities are usually more pragmatically focused on developing concrete abilities. Conversely, European universities are more intellectually oriented, and therefore European students of higher education generally are better equipped to analyse and adapt to new situations in a fast-changing world. From this point of view, instruction is at least as important as research, as far as educational performance is concerned. Public funding of the average European higher education institution also ensures that people with limited resources have access to advanced education. The author also examines ways in which institutions of higher education must adapt to an ever-changing world are analysed, looking at what Europe can learn from the US and vice versa.