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The Bologna effect: the emerging European management Masters market
This is not to say that there was no Masters market in continental Europe before the Bologna reforms. Some institutions in, for example, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Scandinavia had been offering programmes carrying the Masters label for many years, even though there was (at that time) no official government recognition of the degree. However, they were often private schools or spin-offs of a university business faculty operating outside the mainstream of higher education and dependent on market recognition. It is in this context that the MBA has developed in continental Europe, independently of the public universities and outside the regulated degree systems.
Of course, a change of this magnitude is not occurring without a certain level of confusion. On the one hand, university faculties are faced with the difficult task of adjusting their educational mindset to the notion of a graduate curriculum that is other than simply the repackaging of the last one or two years of their previous five-year programmes. A raft of thorny questions arises. How professionally oriented should these new Masters programmes be? How specialised should they be? Should they be one-year or two-year programmes? Should it be a requirement to have studied at the bachelors level in the same field of study? Should admission to the Masters level be automatic for a student who has completed the bachelors degree at the same university?
The risk is that in some cases change will be purely cosmetic, enough for formal compliance with the new laws but not sufficient to achieve the objectives set out in the Bologna agenda. Indeed, many universities are stuck in the middle of the change process, having made some accommodation to the new structure but without having given up many of the features of the old one. In these cases, the new degrees are even less “readable” than previously. One can charitably assume that these are growing pains and that the supply side of the market will eventually sort itself out.
On the other hand, there is uncertainty as to how the new “Bologna” Masters will co-exist with the previous postgraduate Masters programmes that predate Bologna and that were designed from a different market perspective. Some difficulty exists in repositioning the specialised postgraduate programmes that previously recruited students who had graduated with a first degree. In continental Europe, this meant recruiting students who had usually completed five years of higher education, up to a level that now corresponds to a Masters.
Should institutions offering these degrees recruit at a lower age after a three-year bachelors programme? Or should they talk about an “advanced” Masters and continue to recruit older students who already hold a Masters degree? These are issues that will be resolved in time as the market adjusts to the new situation. However, in parallel to the opening up of a Masters market through the implementation of the Bologna agenda, an effort has been made within the management education community to clarify the nomenclature of Masters degrees, given the extreme diversity within this category.
EFMD in collaboration with the EQUAL group of national associations has sought to distinguish between the MBA as a post-experience professional qualification and the new pre-experience generalist Masters programmes that should carry another name such as a Masters in Management or MSc in Management. It is also recommending that the category of specialised Masters in Finance, Marketing, and so on should be distinguished both from the MBA, which is a generalist programme, and from the generalist Masters in Management for younger students. The aim has been not so much to regulate the market as to clarify the landscape so that students and the organisations that recruit them have an understanding of some basic distinctions.
As a result of these convergent trends, a structured market for Masters programmes in business and management is taking shape in Europe around three clearly differentiated segments:
