As Long as We're on the Subject...
... of horrible European universities...
Longtime readers will recall UD's description of her semester teaching at the University of Toulouse - Le Mirail. Now the latest Economist compares Le Mirail to the other Toulouse university, where UD's husband had an appointment, Toulouse I Sciences Sociales.
The Chronicle of Higher Ed summarizes the article nicely:
For years, none of France's public universities has numbered among the world's top 40 in rankings conducted by Shanghai Jiaotong University, and the reason for that poor showing is the system's overcentralized, bureaucratic model, writes Sophie Pedder, the magazine's Paris bureau chief.
In contrast with the country's selective grandes écoles, France's public universities have open-admissions policies and serve 1.5 million students, who are taught in mass classes and have a high dropout rate. Faculty hiring is left up to the central Ministry of National Education, and financing is skimpy.
Ms. Pedder sums up her advice for the public universities in three words: autonomy, competition, and selection. Some of the universities attempt those things, she says, but "the struggle to stay competitive internationally, and to get round the system requires heroic efforts -- a huge waste of time and energy."
The University of Toulouse I-Social Sciences is one institution making such efforts, she writes. Unlike most universities in France, which concentrate on teaching, Toulouse I centers on research and uses private sponsorship to finance projects at external research centers. It also works around the centralized staff-placement system by using a transfer procedure to pull in professors already posted at other universities, and has thus made its economics department the fifth best in the world, according to one global ranking.
Such efforts make a difference, she writes: Eighty-two percent of Toulouse I's third-year undergraduates get their degree on the first try, as opposed to 58 percent at the nearby University of Toulouse II-Le Mirail.
But efforts to improve the system should not be so few and far between, Ms. Pedder writes. Greater autonomy would allow universities to recruit their own faculties, control and expand their research efforts, and increase enrollment fees. Raising the bar also would require a cultural shift, she says, to an understanding that students should not enroll in crowded, "dead-end" courses of study like psychology, and that research and publication are critical to prestige.
The Chronicle diplomatically omits a comment that the shit who runs the Toulouse II show makes to the Economist:
Daniel Filatre, Toulouse II - Le Mirail's president, does not consider [all of] this to be his problem: "This is a left-wing university which has a social project," he explains. "It is not an institution designed for professional training."
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