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Abstract
This paper argues that higher education has a long history of globalising, though the form of these processes has been different. Two are identified; first, a normative order based on common frameworks; second, the expansion of formal exchanges of inputs and outputs from higher education. Different countries, however, are positioned differently in this. Through an analysis of France’s higher education sector, the paper argues that unlike most English speaking and South Asian countries in the recent past, France seems much less interested in increasing its share of the international market of HE teaching services than in developing a competitive R‐D university–industry sector. This implies the de‐construction of the inherited system, and a reallocation of resources toward a new top‐tier of public establishments strongly linked with private economic interests. For that purpose a radical reform of the HE sector was needed. To implement such a reform, one that is strongly opposed by a large part of the academic community, the government has relied on the external resources of international norms and rules of governance. In this field, France appears both as a norm‐maker and a norm‐taker.
Notes
1. For example, last year a flow of British students moved to Holland where they could find the same curriculum, in English, and at a lower price.
2. At the very bottom of the financial crisis in 2008 the shares of the main multinational firms of online education services went up.
3. Data from Campus France (www.campusfrance.org) and Joint Research Centre, European Commission.
4. In 2007–2008, the origins of the 260,596 foreign students in France were: Africa (46.6%), Europe (24.9%), Asia and Oceania (15%), North and South America (7.6%), Middle East (5.6%). http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/fr/rubrique_imprim.php3?id_rubrique=4934.
5. International students in France are treated on the same footing as the domestic ones: education is free and they benefit from social security and housing subsidies. So, even if modest per student, the public cost was around €800 million in 2001 when there were 170,000 foreign students (vs. 250,000 in 2005) (Soulas Citation2007, 31).
6. The French Ministers of foreign affairs and education created Edufrance in 1996 to simultaneously ‘sell our offer of higher education’ on a market then estimated at $21 billion, and ‘win the XXI century battle of intelligence’ by attracting the best minds from the emerging countries. So it seems that, initially, the objective was largely to emulate the British strategy on the global student market.
7. Conférence des Grandes Ecoles Citation2007.
8. There is a heterogeneous post‐secondary technical and professional sector (two–three years), selective, attached either to the universities or to the high schools, and therefore included in the vertical structures.
9. It also said in the report that the monopoly of the main public grandes écoles over the access to the top levels of the civil service would be abandoned, the students graduating from the universities being allowed to apply. This of course has never been mentioned since.
10. Cf. Note 6, supra.
11. Loi organique relative aux lois de finances.
12. Planning, programming, budgeting system.
13. For obvious reasons, considering the division between teaching and research units (e.g., the research production of the CNRS, rated first in Europe by Webometrics, does not enter in the Shangaï calculus) and the language ‘handicap’.
14. A curious precision when industrialised countries compete mainly for the attraction of students from emerging countries.
15. Agence d’évaluation de la recherche et de l’enseignement supérieur.
16. Agence nationale de la recherche.
17. Loi relative aux libertés et responsabilités des universités.