Evidence-Basing the Future of the EHEA

The EHEA has been launched in 2010 with the wider goal of ensuring more comparable, compatible and coherent systems of higher education in Europe. This initiative, deemed by many observers as one of the most successful regional cooperation process in the field of higher education policies, relies on soft-coordination mechanisms grounded on the principle of evidence-based policy making (Deca, 2013). The present article aims at illustrating the way in which European level policy decisions have so far been grounded on evidence, while making the case for potential additional tools that could contribute to achieving the EHEA goals: data analytics, semantic analysis and ‘big data’ approaches.