Literature Review #1

This article provides a comparison of the history and current standing of the European and American models of higher education. The author describes how European universities came to be first, and while American universities were based heavily on their structure, they were not nearly as successful, with many U.S. institutions at the top of national ratings, leaving their European counterparts behind. After World War II, Europe implemented the Bologna process, which allowed universities to standardize their curriculum and degree programs, making it much easier for students to earn their degrees in just a few years and transfer credits between institutions if they desired to do so, allowing for student mobility. The United States's approach to university has remained successful because of limited government involvement in funding, but with constantly rising tuition, may eventually end up limiting access to education to those with a lower income. The article closes by expanding outside the United States and Europe, noting that the increase in quality and accessibility of universities in other nations may cause the powerful hold the education systems of the U.S. and Europe, particularly Great Britain, have over the rest of the world to decline.


Gapinski, Andrzej J. "Higher Education: Europe vs. USA." 2010.

About the Author: Dr. Andrzej J. Gapinski is an associate professor at Penn State University-Fayette. Although he holds multiple degrees in the field of engineering, he is extremely knowledgeable about universities and academia in both the United States and in Europe, as he obtained his PhD from Texas Tech University in the U.S. and his Master's degree from Wroclaw University of Science and Technology in Poland.

Key Terms:
Mobility: Gapinski uses the term mobility to describe how students in the United States have more room to move upward in their education: for example, he describes how it is much easier for students to start at a community college and move on to graduate from a four-year university than in Europe.

International student market: The author interestingly uses the term "market" to describe how students from all over the world choose to attend universities that are not located in their home country. The use of the word market in this context makes it seem like students are a commodity to be bought or invested in, and connects to the idea that universities (particularly in the U.S.) recruit international students for the sake of diversity.

Quotes:
"...the concept of the comprehensive university was somewhat lost in the over-diversification and creation of institutions of vaious and often narrow programmatic scopes" (2).
"A student can start at community college and to [sic] graduate from research-oriented university. In Europe such transferability and mobility would be almost impossible to achieve" (4).
"The U.S. has the biggest share of twenty percent (22%) of the international student market according to London based Observatory on Borderless Higher Education (OBHE)...despite higher tuition costs in US, foreign students see a better investment of their dollars here and are flocking American Universities" (5).

I think that this article is very valuable to my research because it provides a great foundation for finding the differences between American and European universities, which will allow me to explain why students from these academic powerhouses decide to attend university "at home" or internationally. The article also provides statistics from many other sources, making it a great resource for me to find even more academic sources to use for my research. I also think the argument made about countries outside of the U.S. and Europe at the end of the article, although brief, is very interesting, and adds another layer to my research question as well as providing a potential counterargument/caveat to my research.