Policy Note prepared at the request of the World Bank

in (pp. 17-30) Weber & Dolgova-Dreyer (eds) The legitimacy of quality assurnce in higher education, Council of Europe higher education series No. 9, Strasbourg

On the background of the premises and environment described in the preface of this book, the objective of this paper is to contribute to the critical assessment of the progress made over the last quarter of a century in quality assurance – used here as a generic term – in …

Since the l950s, Europe has been engaged in an ambitious political and eonomic integration process which received a new boost with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1999 and, soon afterwards, the collapse of the com­munist USSR. Twenty-five countries now make up the enlarged European Union, soon to be …

In this contribution based on the opening address at the conference as vice-chair of the Steering Committee for Higher Education and Research (CDESR),I want to focus upon what seems to me one, if not the, most important challenge for the future of European higher education and research, and hence for …

At first sight, the topic “public responsibility for higher education and research” might appear a theoretical question of the kind typically cherished by academic thinkers, but without any practical relevance. But I shall argue that, on the contrary, the question is of increasing practical importance for the effectiveness of the …

The European higher education and research sector, as well as the European research universities, are facing issues and challenges that are sometimes different in magnitudc and more often quite different in nature from those in North America. In any case, the continuous transformation of the European higher education and research …