First, the explicit conclusion:
In this regard his friend, Tony Blair, has a telling piece of advice. In 2005, after eight years in Downing Street, the then British prime minister reflected on his experience of implementing change. "Every time I've ever introduced a reform in government," he said, "I wish in retrospect I had gone further." Words for Mr Sarkozy, the architect of rupture-lite, to reflect on.
And then this paragraph struck me:
Reform of higher education was among the first, and most urgent, of Mr Sarkozy's reforms. Only one of France's 82 universities makes it into Shanghai University's top-50 ranking. Most research is done off campus, in separate state-sponsored bodies. Auditoriums are overcrowded, campuses drab and deserted at weekends. Some 46% of all first-year undergraduates drop out. The brightest students do their best to avoid universities altogether, and instead fight to get into one of France's excellent grandes écoles (exclusive institutions outside the main system). Last summer Mr Sarkozy granted the universities autonomy from central state control. This has freed them to recruit the lecturers they want, at salaries they negotiate, and to set up private foundations--with tax breaks for donors--to complement public finance. The idea, says one government adviser, is to encourage a dozen of the most go-ahead universities, such as Toulouse l, to transform themselves into centres of excellence, even if the rest carry on churning out unemployable sociology graduates as before.
Last summer Mr Sarkozy granted the universities autonomy from central state control. This has freed them to recruit the lecturers they want, at salaries they negotiate, and to set up private foundations--with tax breaks for donors--to complement public finance. The idea, says one government adviser, is to encourage a dozen of the most go-ahead universities, such as Toulouse l, to transform themselves into centres of excellence, even if the rest carry on churning out unemployable sociology graduates as before.
So the explicit goal of university reform for the Economist is to create a small layer of elite universities, while the rest of the students can go on being entitled to mediocrity and hopelessness.
But, given that France already has the ("excellent", in the Economist's words) Grandes Ecoles to fill in that niche, I must admit I am a bit confused as to what the point is?
