TIRANA EHEA MINISTERIAL CONFERENCE: A POSTERIORY ANALYSIS OF GAINS & LOSSES

Abstract

The authors of the article analysed the outcomes of the Tirana EHEA Ministerial Conference on May 29-30, 2024. During the conference, the 25-year history of the Bologna Process was summarized, and the prospects for the development of the European Higher Education Area until 2030 were clarified. The list of fundamental values to be implemented has been expanded. The indicators and descriptors for the social dimension of higher education were approved. The intention to make an inclusive, innovative and interconnected EHEA a reality was confirmed. Ukraine and its higher education community were supported in their efforts to resist russia’s full-scale military aggression. Meanwhile, the Tirana Conference removed from the Bologna Process agenda the challenge of achieving “competitiveness and attractiveness” of the EHEA on a global scale. This aim was specified in all previous Bologna ministerial documents, starting with the Bologna Declaration (1999) and ending with the Rome Communique (2020), and constituted the essence of the second, external dimension of higher education development. The reduction of this dimension simplifies the Bologna Process and the EHEA to their first, internal dimension (“compatibility and comparability”). It is substantiated that without the implementation of the second dimension, it is impossible to fully realise the first dimension, and obstacles arise for global balanced mobility and synergistic cooperation. The conference left out the world experience of ranking of countries by the level of university development, without which it is impossible to minimise the gap between them in terms of higher education “competitiveness and attractiveness”. In 2024, more than half of the EHEA member states did not have world-class universities (top 500) according to the Shanghai Ranking criteria, while the remaining countries are highly differentiated in terms of the number and quality of such institutions. The absence of appropriate policies and strategies to align EHEA member states in terms of top-level university excellence (top levelling), as opposed to bottom alignment in terms of minimum acceptable quality, creates barriers to multilevel peer cooperation between universities. In Ukraine, the war unleashed by the russian federation is preventing this from happening. It is proposed to introduce a system of university leagues in the EHEA according to their level of excellence.