We’ve known for years that a degree is no longer enough for one’s entire professional life. The idea of continuing education was born out of the need to supplement and expand existing knowledge and skills from time to time. If “from time to time” becomes “continuously” in the future, the previous front-loading model will also lose its justification. It follows that it would no longer make sense for someone to learn the majority of their field’s expertise in a Bachelor’s or Master’s programme at the start of their career.
The Bachelor’s degree as an entry ticket to the labour market
Instead, we need to go back to the original idea of Bologna: the Bachelor’s degree is supposed to open the door to the labour market, while Master’s courses are already a specialisation and only really make sense as further studies for a select group of people. In such a future, a Master’s degree programme would no longer be an integral part of basic education. This view is already a reality at universities of applied sciences, and such trends are already recognisable at other institutions of higher education.
Some may argue that trimming an undergraduate degree programme causes it to lose its specialist basis and thus its quality. This argument only works, however, if an undergraduate degree programme is viewed as an isolated and self-contained unit, with continuing education seen as an option for filling in gaps in one’s knowledge. But if we assume that there will no longer be seamless training programmes and that continuing education will become the norm, the picture changes as the boundaries become blurred: whether a programme counts as training or rather as continuing education will then no longer play such an important role. And continuous education that flows smoothly into working life also has its advantages. Even today, the quality of a training programme is measured not only by the quantity of knowledge imparted but also by how it can be applied.
