The French government presented a new reform package for higher education tackling
issues of study success, employability of graduates,
diversification and excellence. The changes introduced will
reshape the Bachelor degree (in France called licence) and
are the last piece of legislation to be promoted by Valérie
Pécresse, outgoing Minister for Higher Education and Research.
This resort will be taken over by Laurent Wauquiez, rising star in the French
government, who pledged to continue Pécresse's policies. As he
himself said on his Facebook-page: "Très ému de succéder à
Valérie Pecresse, c'est un vrai défi de poursuivre son oeuvre en
faveur de l'enseignement supérieure et de la recherche. C'est
vraiment un grand honneur d'être à ce poste. C'est un univers que
je connais bien, par mon parcours et mes travaux de
parlementaires." Yes, a modern HE-minister is a nobody if he is not
on Facebook!
Standardization and Diversification
Chief element of the new law is that a minimum number of
teaching hours will be set for every Bachelor education. Currently,
French students experience great variations with arts, languages
and literature programs including as little as 1.200 teaching hours
while 'hard' sciences, technology and health studies require
attendance of up to 1,745 teaching hours. Such consolidation of
study programs is also an essential goal of the Bologna
Process that introduced the European Credit Transfer
Systems (ECTS) with each European credit being worth 28 hours of
studying.
In addition to setting these standards, France also aims at
expanding and personalizing study programs. This means first of all
that licence programs should be made more flexible
allowing students to change their specialization in case they chose
the wrong study track. By diversifying study
courses, public universities are to cater the
interests of their students. Currently, only grandes écoles
guarantee high levels of student-focused higher education. These
institutes, however, are extremely selective and teach only 5% of
the French student population.
Excellence Means Grande École
Pécresse states that public universities would have to move from
"selection by failure" to "success for all" in order to tackle the
extremely low study success rates which
indicate that only about half of French students successfully pass
their first year while 90.000 students leave university without a
degree every year. For those students that excel in their studies,
programs of excellence should be
implemented offering double degrees and study courses preparing for
the entrance exams of the grandes écoles. Honours programs, which
are becoming more popular in the Netherlands, are not part of
this debate as truly excellent students are expected to ultimately
leave public universities and attend a grande école.
Graduate employability is also a vital
concern of the new French higher education policy. Consequently, in
the future, it will be obligatory for every Bachelor program to
offer students the opportunity to do an internship or get work
experience during their study. To test how well graduates from
different universities perform,
benchmarks will be implemented measuring
a range of skills deemed important by the French government. These
include: personal autonomy, capability to analyze and summarize,
computer and language know-how, disciplinary competence and
employment-related knowledge.
Zijstra's own Reforms
Halbe Zijstra, Dutch Minister for Higher Education, recently
published his own new policy paper outlining priorities for
universities and hogescholen in the upcoming years. Issues such as
diversification of study courses were already an important part of
the Veerman report. In his interview with ScienceGuide, the Dutch
HE-minister stresses similar goals like Pécresse by focusing on
benchmarks, employability, better results from bachelor education
and fewer dropouts.
The emphasis on more intensive 'contact education' is also
desired by Zijstra. Going so far as to implement a fixed minimum
number of teaching hours, nevertheless, is not part of future Dutch
HE policy. Grandes Écoles with their elitism, likewise, are rather
strange to the Dutch. Selectivity will be primarily seen as a form
of matching, not as an instrument of explicit élite-development.
Except of course in the Arts Schools.