Quality strategies: what are French universities looking for?

Isabelle Bouchardy
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Isabelle Bouchardy: Université de Toulouse, France

Management & Marketing, 2010, vol. 5, issue 1

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 have 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?

Keywords: efficiency; French higher education; Lisbon strategy; NMP; quality; standards. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
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