Should I Stay or Should I Go? The Impact of the Bologna Reforms on Decisions of Students to Enter Higher Education in Flanders

Following the Bologna Declaration, higher education in the Flemish Community of Belgium has been thoroughly reformed. More precisely, the Bachelor-Master structure has been implemented in 2004-2005 and in the subsequent academic year Flemish higher education was made more flexible by changing the focus from passing the programme of an entire academic year to passing separate courses of the study programme so that students have more freedom to determine the course of their studies. Moreover, to make higher education more accessible to socially disadvantaged students, in 2004 the admission requirements were eased by acknowledging acquired competences from non-educational contexts and from 2005 on more and higher grants were allocated to students.
These reforms fit into the objectives of the Bologna Process to increase the population of higher educated citizens in Europe and to address social inequality in the European Higher Education Area. However, to date, the effects of these reforms in higher education have hardly been evaluated. Therefore, it remains unclear whether these reforms have affected the decision of students in Flanders to enter higher education, and whether they indeed have resulted in an increase of enrolments and success rates, and a decrease of social inequality and drop-out.
In this paper we analyse administrative data of the population enrolled in the Flemish higher education between the year 2000 and 2012 to assess the impact of the recent reforms in higher education on the decision of students to enter higher education. More specifically, we look at (1) whether the reforms increased the inflow of students, (2) whether the composition of the student population changed over time and (3) how the enrolments in higher education evolved over the different study programmes. The answers to these questions provide us with insights in the potential of higher education reforms to change educational outcomes.