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The historic castle in Prague was an appropriate place for a conference this spring of Europe’s major education officials. Its topic was the prospects of European higher education, and the castle–this majestic but confusing labyrinth of structures which inspired Franz Kafka’s novel about contemporary alienation and bureaucracy–was as a good metaphor for the Kafkaesque maze facing students that want to transfer degrees and credits between higher institutions in different European countries.

Europe has a number of the oldest, and greatest, universities. But attempts to unite standards of higher education have constantly played second fiddle to influential regional or national sentiments. And that is slowly altering, nevertheless, as national parliaments struggle with recent assures by ministers to give undergraduates a comparatively harmonized scheme of degrees, credits, as well as requirements.

Sweden’s education minister Thomas Östros who is also a co-chair of this Prague meeting says that student mobility is, undoubtedly, a motivating force for high quality in education, since the best schools benefit. He states that they need to make the higher education systems much more attractive to people from different parts of Europe and from all over the world. Students also agree that the National Unions of Students in Europe that represents students in more than 30 countries has long worked for better mobility –of students, and degrees as well as scholarships. The idea of an area of European Higher Education, which was discussed during the meeting in Prague, has got the roots in a meeting (in 1998) in Paris of ministers of education from France, Germany, and the U K, and also from Italy. Several years ago the ministers agreed in Bologna to move to easily readable and analogous degrees– counting bachelor’s as well as master’s degrees in the majority of fields. Other goals comprise standardizing a scheme of transferable credits; setting up “quality assurance” networks in order to examine each other’s degrees as well as credits; and making the students’ and researchers’ movement across national borders easier.