Before the Bologna process, engineering and CS degrees in Portugal used to be 5 year courses, minimum. After the Bologna process, curricula were modified so that courses could have a 3 year minimum.<p>This, by itself, isn&#x27;t a bad thing.<p>However, the market perception is that these 3 year courses give the same level of qualification as the previous 5 year courses. It doesn&#x27;t help that the name of the degree has been made the same on purpose (&quot;licenciatura&quot;). &quot;They just removed useless stuff,&quot; they say.<p>This feeds back into students as &quot;no need to go any further.&quot; Once they have reached the degree that the market recognizes (the &quot;licenciatura&quot;) there isn&#x27;t much incentive to continue for another 2 years to get a masters degree (btw, in the previous system a masters degree was 7 years).<p>Universities have to handle this somehow, and they do it by actually &quot;removing useless stuff&quot; from the 3 year curriculum thus reinforcing market perception and actually putting themselves on course to become training schools instead of universities.<p>These arguments are pretty specific to the portuguese case, and elsewhere things are bound to have been different but with the same general outcome. The general argument is this: solving the comparability problem between EU countries went too far and breached the universities&#x27; ability to resist outside influence (mainly political).<p>PS: The ECTS system is deeply flawed exactly because it is based on &quot;hours of effort.&quot; Not only bacause that&#x27;s a subjective measure on its own, but mainly because &quot;effort&quot; does not directly correlate to actual learning. A course may have very work-intensive assignments for very little knowledge.