A Chance for European Universities: Or: Avoiding the Looming University Crisis in Europe

Europe's universities are well represented among the worlds top 200 universities, but almost absent in the top 50. They are economically, culturally and socially underexploited. There is an urgent need to alter the context for European universities to strengthen the European competitive position through economic innovation, increased social cohesion and a more vibrant cultural dynamism. The unbalanced demographics in the world - with a virtually constant supply of graduates in the developed West and a potentially fast increase in the number of graduates in developing countries - pose both new threats and new opportunities for European universities. Jo Ritzen outlines a series of changes necessary to make European universities more successful, from denationalization of the Bologna process with emphasis on European-wide accreditation and quality control, to rebalancing the financing system so that the public budget cuts of the past decades can be met by private sources