Announced reforms to the French Baccalaureate, as well as reforms that were already decided on admission policies to universities, provide an opportunity to finally take a serious look at the problem of how higher education is organized.
First, some obvious points/facts:
1. Apart from those whose vocations are clearly affirmed, and those whose parents have high financial or cultural capital, most adolescents today do not know how to choose the job that would be best for them.
2. When adolescents who are in high school today, including those who have the means to pursue higher education, will be ready to enter the labour market, a very important number of today’s trades will have disappeared.
3. With few exceptions, adolescents privileged by the cultural and financial capital of their families are fleeing universities and trying go go through the selective path in order to reach the “Grandes Ecoles” or institutions specific to their vocations.
4. When someone has failed to find his career path during his studies, it is practically impossible to make up for it during adulthood: in France, failure is not a lesson, but a definitive life-altering bifurcation.
5. Funding for continuous training, which in France is more than twice the budget of universities (excluding research), elude universities today almost entirely to the benefit of private enterprises. However, the private sector generally lacks any academic legitimacy and there is no oversight regarding their efficiency; and it does not serve its purpose of filling the gap of failures during the initial studies.
The results of this:
1. We must cease to consider the first academic cycle in higher education as the only key to enter into long-term careers, guaranteeing social status, from which others would be excluded.
2. Apprenticeship and work-linked training must become a natural component to higher education, until the doctorate degree.
3. Universities must be able to permanently follow the career of their alumni, deduce from it changes to their curricula and its future; similar to what some “Grandes Ecoles” already are, places of continuing education, where pupils come back on a regular basis to acquire new skills.
This implies absolutely radical changes to the way we think about our higher education system:
1. First in financial terms: universities must claim a major share of the resources allocated to lifelong training and they must acquire the necessary skills to render these new services.
2. In terms of logistics: with these new resources, and in order to render these new services, universities, libraries, cafeterias, meeting places for teachers and students, will then have to stay open 16 hours a day, 12 months out of 12.
3. Finally, in terms of status: the career of a teacher should depend on at least as much, if not more, on his ability to teach to young students and to senior staff, than his ability to do research, which must, however, remain inseparable.
It will be extraordinarily difficult to carry out these changes: the governance of higher education and those of vocational training and continuing education are at odds with each other. If we succeed, we will finally have given France the means of its ambitions.
j@attali.com