The Finns are also engaged in the growing international movement to create world-class universities. The United States has a hugely disproportionate share of the institutions so designated, and Americans seem to assume that will never change. Understanding that it’s not easy to inflate the status of a single institution, the Finns are trying the more novel approach of combining three. The Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki University of Technology, and University of Art and Design Helsinki are in the process of becoming Aalto University, a cross-disciplinary institution named for the famous Finnish master of design.</p>
<p>But in the long run, the most significant change in Finnish higher education may result from yet another larger European event: the Bologna Process, a vast, decade-long effort to harmonize European higher education that is spreading from the Continent to the rest of the world. In addition to standardizing degree cycles and easing the transfer of credit, Bologna has prompted universities across Europe to re-examine the way students are taught and what they’re meant to learn. “It’s a totally different way of thinking,” Lehikoinen told us. “Our universities were built on the traditional Continental model of the research institution. Bologna puts students at the center of our attention, changing the focus from teaching to student-learning outcomes.” Credit hours offer a telling example. While American credits are based on the number of hours students have contact with faculty members, credits in the Bologna Process are based on the number of hours students are expected to work to meet defined learning goals.</p>
<p>At the moment, legislators in Finland are working to fine-tune their system, consolidating some lower-enrollment institutions in rural areas, providing government support based on certain performance measures, and giving colleges and universities more autonomy to operate and raise private money on their own. They won’t stray too far from the egalitarian tenets of the Nordic welfare state, however tuition will remain free for all Finnish and European Union students. As one university official put it, “In Finland, privatization means all the funding still comes from the government.”</p>
<p>Upon returning home, it’s hard to look at American higher education and not see a kind of stagnation. Since the community-college systems were completed, in the 1970s, hardly anything in the core public and private nonprofit sectors has changed. We still have all the same institutions, organized (and unorganized) in almost exactly the same way. Attainment rates are flat for the most part, and many students who enter college still fail to graduate the only difference is that they now pay a lot more money to do so. The tidal forces of the Bologna Process are still only ripples, or at least appear to be, by the time they reach our shores.</p>
<p>But few people in our country seem worried because everyone knows (and if they forget, are often reminded) that America has the greatest higher-education system in the world. Unlike those with different histories, we take preeminence for granted. We also have a remarkably high tolerance for failure, with barely half of all students graduating within six years. “In a huge country like the United States or Germany,” Vahasalo noted, “maybe you don’t need to take care of everybody to have the educated people you need. We are small, so everyone counts.”</p>
<p>When the American economy held a bounty of blue-collar jobs, low college-attainment rates were more manageable. But increasingly, everyone counts here, too.</p>
<p>And there’s no guarantee that our global dominance of higher education will last forever. One of the fascinating things about the Bologna Process is the way that it has spread to countries in the European orbit and potentially beyond. The examination of student-learning goals inherent in the process is far more serious than anything most state and federal policy makers would even contemplate asking of American institutions in part because many American policy makers don’t even know the Bologna Process exists.