There are developments that we refuse to see, because they seem so crazy that we do not pay attention to all the signs that announce them. And when they happen, one is surprised, admired or shouted out. Then it’s too late.
For example, what is happening globally in universities and colleges.
First, apart from a few very well-endowed universities, these suffer from structural funding weaknesses. Especially in emerging countries. Secondly, an increasing proportion of the educational curricula in virtually all fields is increasingly made up of work placements in firms, thus joining vocational education.
More recent developments, in many countries, especially where higher education is funded by students, companies come to explain to the best high school students at the end of secondary studies (after leaving college in the USA) that they would have nothing to gain from enrolling in a university when the company proposes to hire them immediately, train them, pay them, Also arguing that universities cannot have the same level of competence in advanced technologies.
Higher education programmes are emerging in many ways within firms.
We also see the emergence of universities without professors, where students train among themselves, with distant supervisors. We see finally the emergence of private, virtual universities, with no physical reality, issuing imaginary degrees made up of a juxtaposition of internships in companies. The firm is thus surreptitiously becoming the framework, first partial and then total, of higher education. This could lead to the collapse of higher education systems, which will lose their best students and teachers, and sources of income.
There is still a step to be taken, and one way or another by a school, a university and then many others: to offer an entire curriculum reserved for future employees of a specific company, who would fund it, and who would pay the best students to reserve their services after graduation. The large companies that will launch it will have everything to gain by training exactly those they will need and being led, thus, to define their needs more precisely. Universities that do so will have new revenues, particularly welcome in countries where states are unwealthy; they will thus gradually become business universities.
The scandal will be shouted. Once again, the market has invaded a public services dimension. How can we accept that the university is no longer just a training place for employees of a particular company, which would define the content of courses? How to run the risk that the university is no longer just a place for ultra-utilitarian training of students whose companies will get rid of as soon as their knowledge has become obsolete? How can we accept that, if this development comes to an end, the company has a say in the recruitment of teachers? How can we accept the loss of what is the very essence of university education, namely its autonomy, universalism, freedom of expression and research?
Despite this, everything is in place for this evolution to take place; first of all in the private universities, whose funding depends largely on the students’ tuition fees and the donations of former students. At the time of writing, companies are already negotiating such partnerships with universities; first in universities in Anglo-Saxon countries, with a much more utilitarian tradition. The most enlightened of these companies place it in a vision to thirty or forty years of their trades, and in the framework of a permanent training, also entrusted to these universities. It will also come in Europe, and even in France, temple of uninterested teaching.
It is not by being tense about the acquired will avoid it. By making the university a place of excellence in training for fundamental, very long-term subjects, especially in learning science and in the practice of basic research, that companies cannot generally afford to finance alone. These training courses will be fundamental for a country that cannot survive without research. It is therefore in the glorious creative uselessness of discovery and its transmission that lies the specificity of the university. Only far-sighted and strategic states, democratic enough to accept all research, will be able to implement such a policy. Where are they?
j@attali.com
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