Between Social-democratic Concerns and Neo-liberal Realities: What Type of Social Model Does the EU Promote in the Field of Higher Education?

Despite the lack of legislative competence, the European Union (EU) is increasingly involved in higher education (HE) in Europe. Even though not direct and explicit, for example through various financial instruments, influence is exercised, and it is plausible to expect that the ideational diffusion from the EU towards its member states might lead to certain degree of normative convergence along the lines of the EU vision. But what is the higher educational vision that the EU stands for? What are the key messages and policy measures that it advocates for?
In order to characterize the HE model promoted by the EU, this paper adopts 10 indicators that are inspired by the concepts de-commodification and stratification used by Esping-Andersen (1990) to distinguish a liberal, a conservative and a social-democratic welfare state model in Europe. These ten `higher education variables´ constitute the framework for qualitative content analysis of 68 official policy documents of the Commission, the European Parliament and the European Council.
The analysis reveals that overall the EU displays the rhetoric of a liberal welfare model. However, social-democratic values are still very much present in EU discourse when it comes to the financing of HE, and hereby the ‘European Social Model' is still quite visible despite the gen-eral neo-liberal turn and climate of budgetary austerity. Yet, the EU advocates for an increased individual share in the costs for higher education. Moreover, a key ambition for the EU is open-ing higher education for private businesses and making it more responsive to the needs of the economy, especially in the fields of tracks and curricula. This goal, however, is not coupled with a concern about nor a vision how to counteract the threat to academic autonomy. Especially this last finding charts clearly the predominance of (neo-)liberal ideas and respectively the neo-liberal character of the EU policy discourse in the field of higher education.