The Bologna Process From a Latin American Perspective

Although Latin America’s geography, history, and languages might seem a suitable foundation for a Bologna-type process, the development of a common Latin American higher education and research area meets predictable difficulties.The reasons are to be found in the continent’s historic and modern institutional patterns. Latin American governments increasingly limit their interventions to funding and rely on the free play of the forces of supply and demand, institutional and corporate interests, and negoti-ated rules of the game to coordinate their systems. Moreover, Latin America’s dynamic tertiary education systems face structural, organizational, and functional obstacles that often discourage international convergence.However, Bologna is stimu-lating closer university collaboration between Latin American and European institu-tions, particularly Spanish and Portuguese universities, in an effort to create an Ibero-American area of knowledge, with student and faculty exchanges. Thus Bologna has had an indirect stimulus by encouraging collaboration, and concomitant issues such as Latin America’s current debate about curricular reform and higher education competitiveness. I n spite of the enthusiasm that the Bologna process has raised in some Latin American academic and government circles and the European effort to push the “external dimension” of this process, in Latin America’s present circumstances Bologna represents an unlikely goal.