The Economist a publié il y a deux semaines une enquête sur les blocages que connaît la France et propose des solutions libérales pour qu’elle puisse les surmonter.

 De nombreux journaux français  se sont faits l’écho de cet article qui passe en revue  l’économie, l’intégration, la politique étrangère et l’enseignement supérieur.

Pour traiter ce dernier point, le journaliste prend l’exemple de deux universités toulousaines !

Tout de suite, ça résonne un peu différemment non ?

Notre journaliste compare donc Toulouse I (Arsenal) et Toulouse II(Le Mirail). La première a réussi  en contournant le carcan administratif, imposé par un Etat centralisateur, à devenir la cinquième université de sciences économiques la plus réputée au monde. La deuxième connaît un taux d’échec de ses étudiants colossal(46% les premières années) ce qui ne dérange pas son président qui ose déclarer «  c’est une université de gauche qui a un projet social » …

Toutefois le succès de l’Arsenal ne peut pas être imputé à la réussite du modèle de l’enseignement supérieur français, puisque l’université s’est donnée les moyens de sélectionner ses professeurs, a créé des associations qui lui sont extérieures (officiellement) pour avoir des contrats des recherche avec des entreprises etc…

 
La France, comme le soulignent The Economist et Alternative Libérale ,possède les talents, libérons les !

 L'article:

Lessons from the campus

Oct 26th 2006
From The Economist print edition

In higher education, a free-for-all does not work

EACH year, when Shanghai's Jiao Tong University publishes its world ranking of universities, France responds with a mix of indignation and consternation. Indignation, because French educators complain that the system favours “Anglo-Saxon” universities and makes no allowance for France's unusual division into elite grandes écoles and mass universities. Consternation, because not a single French university makes it into the world's top 40. Its best-placed institution—Paris VI—manages only 45th place.

AlamyToulouse I: cogito, ergo sum

France's university system encapsulates many of the drawbacks of its over-centralised, bureaucratic model. The country has 82 universities, catering to 1.5m students, twice the number of 25 years ago. All are public, and all the lecturers are civil servants. All the universities are barred from selecting undergraduates at entry. Enrolment fees amount to less than €200 a year, and all tuition is paid for by the state. Members of France's elite do their utmost to keep their children out of them and get them into the grandes écoles—for business, engineering or public administration—that cater to a lucky 4% of the student population.

To understand how France is tying its own hands with this system, consider two universities that lie just a few kilometres apart in the south-western city of Toulouse. Both are big: Toulouse I Sciences Sociales, a quick walk from the pink-brick Place du Capitole in the city centre, has 17,000 students; Toulouse II-Le Mirail, a short metro ride away on the city's outskirts, over 24,000. Both were spun off as separate universities after France's 1968 student riots, which led to the break-up of many of the country's giant universities. Both cover, broadly, the social sciences: Toulouse I offers economics, political science, law and management; Toulouse II-Le Mirail spans literature, philosophy, history, human sciences, arts and maths.

Toulouse II-Le Mirail, a low-rise 1960s campus of squat grey concrete blocks, looks like a demonstration model of most of France's difficulties with its university system. It has pockets of research excellence, such as in archaeology, and it has adapted to international standards by introducing the new Europe-wide bachelor and masters degree structure. But it concentrates on mass teaching in subjects—philosophy, psychology, sociology—that ill-prepare graduates for jobs.

Lecture halls are overcrowded. In one vast 800-seat amphitheatre, steeply banked rows of impassive students listen to a lecturer mumbling on a distant platform. Each year, 46% of all new students enrolled drop out. Daniel Filâtre, Toulouse II-Le Mirail's president, does not consider this to be his problem: “This is a left-wing university which has a social project,” he explains. “It is not an institution designed for professional training.”

Yet it is clearly a worry for the students. Fears about job insecurity prompted the countrywide university revolt earlier this year against Mr de Villepin's flexible contract for the under-26s. Two months of sit-ins, blockades and often violent skirmishes with riot police forced the prime minister to shelve his plan. But the malaise on French campuses such as Toulouse II-Le Mirail remains.

A generation ago most university graduates could have gone on to secure jobs in the public sector, often teaching the subjects they studied. Even today one startling poll suggested that three-quarters of French students would like to become civil servants. But the rapid expansion of numbers passing the school-leaving examination (baccalauréat)—from 25% of the relevant age group in 1980 to 62% today—has flooded France's non-selective universities. Too many enrol in “soft” subjects rather than science or technology. Some 45,000 study a subject called “sports science”. Employers prefer to hire from vocational-training colleges. And sociology or psychology graduates often find their degrees worthless on the jobs market.

“Lots of students do want to become civil servants,” says Anna Mélin, a Toulouse student-union leader: “We're not adventurous because we are afraid.” Students worry about something the French call déclassement, meaning they have to accept jobs beneath the level they think their degree entitles them to. “Unemployment weighs on our minds,” says Ms Mélin. “We're the first generation that lives worse than our parents. Perhaps we in France have certain privileges, but I've no trouble admitting that we want to preserve them.”

In a bid to do so, student unions blockaded the campus at Le Mirail for two and a half months during the university sit-ins earlier this year. Graffiti sprayed on the walls linger: “We will strike against capitalism” and “We do not want to return to life as normal”. It is hard to find anybody satisfied with the way things are. Teachers are fed up because they are poorly paid and feel treated as second-class citizens. Students do not feel they get enough support. The 4,000 new undergraduates who arrive at Le Mirail each year get no tutorial support or careers advice. There is no bar on campus. The library is light, airy and brand new, but it closes at 6pm on weekdays and is shut at weekends.

Across the Garonne

On the other side of the river, at Toulouse I, bicycles lean against red-brick courtyards and students sit cross-legged in the shade of plane trees. Toulouse I has not found a solution to all the difficulties Le Mirail faces. All the same, across all disciplines, 82% of third-year undergraduates there get their degree at their first attempt, compared with 58% at Toulouse II-Le Mirail. During the student revolt the Toulouse I campus was shut only for a brief period, and student leaders were booed.

It helps that the university has an international reputation for economics. It ranks fifth in the world for research in business economics, after the universities of Harvard, Berkeley, Chicago and Stanford, according to a global ranking. This autumn it launched the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), which offers a two-year masters programme, taught entirely in English and designed for the international market.

In the 1980s Toulouse I was a social-science university much like any other, unable to select its staff or its students and squeezed for funds. Instead of accepting its lot, however, it decided to work around the rules. First, in order to help with finance, it sought private sponsorship for research. Various research centres were set up as associations, officially outside the university management structure and therefore not subject to civil-service rules. These were able to solicit research contracts directly with companies, such as France Telecom or Microsoft.

Second, it put research at the heart of the university structure. In general, universities in France concentrate on teaching, with research mostly organised by national public-research bodies. But international rankings put weight on research, which penalises the French. Toulouse I's Institute of Industrial Economics (IDEI), set up in 1990 by Jean-Jacques Laffont, a Harvard-trained economist, realised early on that it needed teachers and researchers to work and publish together in order to lift international rankings. This sounds simpler than it is. Even today, the institute's researchers are often employed not by the university but by the National Centre for Scientific Research—yet they also sign their papers in the university's name.

Third, Toulouse I has tried to get round the selection problem, though with greater success on the staff front than with undergraduates. It cannot refuse students who have the baccalauréat, so it gets plenty of mediocre ones in the early years. As for university staff, all posts are allocated by the Ministry of Education in Paris and recruited for nationally, through committees that include representatives of teachers' unions. Candidates for the most prestigious professorships are examined by a national jury, and universities with vacancies must accept the jury's choices. To get round this absurd system, Toulouse I no longer directly recruits economics professors certified by the jury. Instead, it uses a transfer procedure to lure some of those who have taken up posts elsewhere.

The system can still defeat such efforts. Because lecturers are civil servants, academic appointments follow a calendar imposed by the Ministry of Education; job offers can be made only in the summer term. “But by then the international market has closed,” says Jacques Crémer, IDEI's director. “We lost a great candidate to the London School of Economics in January this year because he couldn't wait.” The struggle to stay competitive internationally, and to get round the system, requires heroic efforts—a huge waste of time and energy.

Reorganisation 101

The three watchwords for French universities are autonomy, competition and selection. First, if universities are to create centres of excellence they will need greater freedom: for example, to recruit their staff, to set up experimental links with research bodies or to increase enrolment fees. But before they can be granted such autonomy, their governing structures will need to become more effective and less beholden to unions.

Second, unless France embraces the idea of competition, the creed of egalitarianism will drag down quality for everybody. Part of the answer is more autonomy, to make experimentation possible. But it also requires a cultural shift. Does France want its best universities rewarded? Does it want them to compete for staff? Does it want to recognise that some universities are better than others? International league tables are prompting some change. To boost rankings, the government is creating “research poles” for universities and research centres to publish their findings jointly. It is also beginning to publish comparative graduation rates and job prospects for all universities.

This leads to the third problem: selection. The government hopes that by making such information public, it will deter would-be undergraduates from enrolling in dead-end subjects. For example, France currently has 65,000 psychology students—a quarter of the European total for that subject. Unless universities also get some say in whom they accept, such numbers are unlikely to fall much. And selection remains taboo. Could France ever allow universities to pick undergraduates at entry? “Oh là là!” replies a top education official. “It's not in the French mentality.”

But France does use selection for all its grandes écoles. Indeed, entrance exams to such places as Polytechnique and the Ecole des Mines (both engineering), Sciences-Po (political science), the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (public policy), HEC and ESSEC (business) are so stiff that they require two years' preparatory study. Such schools are regularly rated and ranked.

It is the grandes écoles that produce the well-polished graduates who get snapped up by companies in London or New York. And their alumni continue to hold power in France, in government as well as in the boardroom. Seven of the past 12 prime ministers, and two of the past three presidents, including both current incumbents, went to ENA. Some number-crunching done by The Economist for this survey shows that the grip of just two top schools—ENA and Polytechnique—on corporate France has actually increased over the past 20 years. When the CAC 40 index was created in 1987, 24% of the bosses of the companies it covered were graduates of one or other of those schools. By January this year that share had grown to 50%.

In reality, even the apparently non-selective universities apply a form of selection by quietly putting up with very high drop-out rates. But it comes after a huge waste of money and effort. “The French accept the brutality of selection on condition that we maintain the illusion of formal equality,” says Elie Cohen, an economist and member of the government's advisory Council of Economic Analysis. But on the face of it selection and competition are deemed to be bad for everybody—except the privileged ranks of a tiny elite.