Title: Quality strategies: are French
universities
really innovative?
Abstract: Using
steps transposed from corporate quality strategies, French universities
have
entered a new stage of their modernization, illustrative of the current
of
New Public Management. These strategies, destined to combine missions
of
excellence and the transformation of thousands of young people into
graduates,
will be studied here with regard to different horizons which they
suggest
for French higher education. In change for the last 40 years, called
into
question over its costs, its production, and its management, university
is
at the crossroads of autonomy, clientelism and professionalisation. Our
system
of higher education must now combine savings, realignment, local
governorship,
partnerships and a geographical distribution of training opportunities,
within
the new European arena of degrees. However, it suffers from several
handicaps (at once fiscal, legislative, administrative and social)
aggravated by a specifically French fracture : how then can the quality
strategies
put in place, bring about the efficiency coveted by higher education ?
This
higher education system demonstrates several innovations and has begun
to
make surveys of the employability levels of its graduates. Thus,
benchmarking
is available on the condition that the criteria and indicators of the
performance
comparison are reached by consensus, and that's not the case: is it
political
arbitration (that rules over university as a public service) or market
arbitration
which determines the value of degrees? calibration and measurement
could
not be the same: who decides? Which path opens to university to come
out
this dilemma?
Authors: Isabel
Bouchardy and Jean-Louis Darreon
