Throughout the US, across Europe, and most especially on the Internet, the university supermarkets are opening up in their hundreds. You name your degree and you can buy it.
No messing around with four years in classes with those awful examinations and the possibility of failure. You choose your discipline and degree level, and you can get it in weeks or months with minimal or no examinations but with the payment, of course, of the appropriate fee.
Check out the Internet search for "non-accredited universities" and you will get a whole panorama of institutions with their different offers such as: "Diplomas from prestigious non-accredited universities based on your present knowledge and life experience. No required tests, classes, books or interviews. Bachelors, Masters, MBA and Doctorate (PhD) diplomas available in the field of your choice."
These institutions claim, I think correctly, that they are completely legitimate and the diplomas they confer are genuine, while admitting openly that they are "non-accredited" and saying "no one will ever know how you earned it unless you tell them!"
So, if you feel like having MBA (Master of Business Administration) after your name on your CV or business card, or better still call yourself "Doctor", you just have to get out your credit card or chequebook and the job is done. You will get your fancy degree parchment with its Latin or Olde English language in the post, stamped with the waxed seal and signature of the chancellor, and it will all be legitimate.
It is these and related developments which have given rise to intense interest and activity over the past decade in the international higher-education world in what's known as QA, quality assurance. And quality, it is said, is like an elephant, very difficult to describe but you recognise it when you see it.
Students in the EU Socrates programme, for example, and graduates generally are now far more mobile than ever before so that universities and employers everywhere need to know the standards of their home university or higher-education institution. There is a growing fear that if this situation is left unchecked, it will result in chaos in both the university and industrial market places.
The European universities and their respective national and international agencies are taking this situation very seriously but at the moment they are not very sure what to do about it. Many universities have established their own QA offices with varying strategies to ensure the quality of their different degree programmes. International agencies such as Equis, for business studies, and the American Abet programme for engineering studies are overwhelmed with new business so that the universities may boast of such accreditation in order to attract students and to ensure the employability and mobility of their graduates.
In many European countries, the emphasis of this quite frenzied activity is on institutional and programme self-evaluation, where the universities fear that their governments, under pressure from industry and the taxpayer, may impose a heavily bureaucratic and autocratic system of QA, and worse still, programme accreditation.
Academics everywhere look with horror at the UK where government-enforced QA and programme evaluation has gone somewhat over the top, so that not only is research funding dependent on the quality rating, but the future viability of individual academic departments and degree programmes.
Academics in British universities complain that they spend all their time filling out QA forms and entertaining visiting evaluation panels. (They do so in Ireland too but less vociferously). In the United States, there is a long history of institutional evaluation and accreditation, whereby universities have a cyclical evaluation visitation.
In this visit, a team of university management experts in such areas as student systems, alumni fundraising and academic structures invade the campus and grade the overall institution on a one-to-six-scale, where one is perfect and five and six are fails. Failure can mean that students lose their state grants so it's a very serious business. The mood in European universities is very much against such a quantitative system but it is acknowledged that the situation is getting out of hand and that something will have to be done.
With this background, some 29 European ministers of education met in Bologna on June 19th, 1999, and signed what is known as the Bologna Declaration. This follows on from the Sorbonne Declaration of the previous year and seeks "the creation of the European area of higher education as a key way to promote citizens' mobility and the Continent's overall development". It speaks of the construction of "the European area of higher education" and the aim of achieving "greater compatibility and comparability of the systems of higher education".
The Bologna Declaration also identifies six specific objectives all geared towards academic "convergence", which, along with "benchmarking", are the key Eurospeak words in the current higher-education vocabulary in Brussels. The ministers undertook to attain these objectives and decided to meet again "within two years in order to assess the progress achieved and the new steps to be taken".
So it is that the ministers of education, presumably including our own, will meet again in Prague on May 18th and 19th. The progress towards this creation of a European higher-education space as promoted by both the Sorbonne and Bologna declarations is essentially a process of structural change which calls for a reform of national systems, as well as for curricular and institutional changes in the higher-education institutions. While the debate on this convergence process has been intense over these past two years, with an extraordinary number of conferences and seminars on the Bologna theme, the interest over Europe has ranged from subzero to very intense indeed.
It is perhaps dangerous to generalise but it would seem that the older, more established universities have tended to stay above this whole frenzied debate, being totally uninterested in its objectives, whereas the newer institutions, possibly hoping for greater credibility in the international academic world from a European accreditation process, are more enthusiastic.
Likewise, looking at the reaction of the countries of Europe, the Eastern European countries seem to be more interested and better organised in seeking the stated objectives than their Western counterparts. Also it would appear that the interest has been greatest where the proliferation of private institutions offering unaccredited MBAs has been extensive.
Here in Ireland, there has been much innovative activity in the QA areas in our universities and institutes of technology but the debate on Bologna has been quiet.
Finally, it is of interest to consider the issue of accreditation, which may mean either institutional accreditation or the accreditation of individual academic programmes, and they're two very different things. Many European countries have their own national institutional evaluation systems so the idea of a superior European institutional accreditation system, which might not always agree with the national decisions in this area, cannot be a politically stable arrangement.
As regards academic programme accreditation, the difficulties of a pan-European system would be compounded. Most professional university qualification shave their own long established system of cyclical accreditation, and most of these are recognised internationally.
In the non-professional academic areas, such as the humanities, the thought of an accreditation visitation procedure is a difficult one as the structure of such courses are generally individualistic and non-uniform. In these disciplines, the academics have a natural and healthy resistance towards a European or any type of convergence, but maybe I'm wrong in this.
And yet, there seems to be a strong movement towards this creation of a European higher-education space which would involve some form of official recognition, if not accreditation, of worthy academic institutions and programmes, and more importantly, the public rejection of sham institutions and their qualifications.
The idea of a European QA "platform" which would bring together all existing national QA agencies in loose co-operation was discussed at the Association of European Universities Conference in Lisbon in February. It is attractive in that it builds on existing structure rather than building a new one and it seemed to have the general approval of that meeting.
The great fear we all have in academe is that our ministers will be persuaded to create a major new layer of European intrusive bureaucracy, which will stifle if not kill completely, the great diversity and autonomy which most European higher education now enjoys.
John Kelly is Professor Emeritus, and a former registrar, at University College Dublin