The Impact of the Bologna Reform on the Productivity of Swiss Universities

Abstract

The Bologna reform aims to enhance several dimensions of the universities' activities, by favouring mobility and mutual recognition of higher education degrees across Europe, with the objective to create a European Higher Education Area. The radical changes induced by the Bologna Process affect universities' productivity both directly (for example, implementation costs, curriculum streamlining, evaluation intensity) and indirectly (for example, the ability to attract more students and higher levels of competition among institutions). The decentralised organisation of the Swiss university sector provides an ideal setting to test this hypothesis, as the panel data of departments permits the consideration of the unobserved heterogeneity across both universities and scientific fields. The empirical results support the claim that the Bologna reform enhances university productivity. Furthermore, there is no evidence of substantial costs of the system transformation. IntroductionThe Bologna process, starting in 1999, intended to create a European Higher Education Area by setting up a common regulatory framework. This policy agenda was rich and encompassed many different strategic goals: on a long-term perspective, the goals are: (i) adopting a two-tier (undergraduate and graduate) higher education structure; (ii) promoting comparable and easily readable degrees; (iii) establishing a common system of formative credits across Europe; (iv) promoting within-Europe mobility of students and researchers; (v) fostering cooperation in quality assurance methods and tools; and (vi) promoting the European dimension of the higher education system (see Bologna Declaration,

The dynamics of productivity in Swiss universities

“…Our results do not favor any significant impact from Bologna reform or internationalization. This result is in contrast to Agasisti and Bolli (2013)'s finding, namely a productivity-enhancing impact for Bologna reform. This difference can be explained by richer specification of temporal effects in this paper, which could capture much of the dynamic variation.…”

“…The latter finding is consistent with a positive trend in costs reported by Filippini and Lepori (2007). Agasisti and Bolli (2013)'s results indicate a general productivity decline but a positive productivity impact for Bologna reforms. While the authors do not examine the scale effects, their regression results indicate decreasing returns to scale suggesting that the expansion of universities could have detrimental productivity effects.…”

“…The topic has received attention in two recent studies (Olivares and Schenker-Wicki 2012;Agasisti and Bolli 2013), but the results show some conflicting trends warranting further research. While the former study points to important gains due to scale effects combined with a negative technological progress, the latter suggests a general decline in productivity but with little evidence of positive scale effects.…”

“…In the case of Switzerland, the related empirical literature is limited to three studies: Agasisti and Bolli (2013) examine the productivity impact of the Bologna reform using an output distance function estimated at the department-level from 1995 to 2010, whereas Olivares and Schenker-Wicki (2012) estimate the development of universities' technical efficiency between 1999 and 2007, using a Malmquist index based on DEA. Finally, Filippini and Lepori (2007) estimate a variable cost function using a true random effects SFA (Greene 2005), on the data between 1994 and 2003.…”

“…Virtually all previous studies have pooled the longitudinal data across universities and hence do not exploit the panel data advantages to account for unobserved heterogeneity. Among the exceptions we should mention Filippini and Lepori (2007), Horne and Hu (2008) and Agasisti and Bolli (2013) that include university or department-specific effects in their estimations. The adopted approach in this paper is similar to Horne and Hu (2008) and Farsi (2008) in that we use individual intercepts to account for the unobserved factors pertaining to an individual production unit (here, a university department).…”