Reposted from Science magazine, August 31, 2001.  PRAGUE--
Prague's historic castle was an appropriate setting for a
meeting this past spring of Europe's top education officials.
The topic was the future of higher education in Europe, and the
castle--a majestic but confusing maze of structures that
inspired Franz Kafka's classic novel about modern alienation and
bureaucracy--served as a metaphor for the Kafkaesque labyrinth
facing students who want to transfer degrees or credits between
colleges in different European nations.  Europe has some of the
world's oldest, and best, universities. But efforts to unify
higher education standards have always played second fiddle to
powerful regional and national sentiments. That is slowly
changing, however, as national parliaments wrestle with recent
promises by government ministers to provide undergraduates with
a relatively harmonized system of degrees, credits, and
requirements.  "Student mobility is a driving force for quality
in higher education, because the best un