A national strategy for French Higher Education: preparing for the future in an international context (offered by République Française)

Chair: Renée Zicman, PUC-SP/FAUBAI

Bertrand Monthubert, University of Toulouse III Paul Sabatier

Due to reforms successively made by several governments, the landscape of French Higher Education and research has changed rapidly over the last decade. This general trend was based, and still is, on the necessary adaptation of Higher Education and research institutions to the new realities of French society in a global context.

Facing this process of rapid changes, and understanding the risk of accumulative measures unrelated to each other, a perspective and prospective work was defined by a new law in July 2013, defining a National Strategy for Higher Education (StraNES), that should be developed and revised every 5 years.

In consonance with a National Strategy for Research, under the responsibility of the ministerial services, StraNES was developed by an independent committee, representative of the diversity of the French academic community. Bertrand Monthubert was then appointed its General Rapporteur, in partnership with the Committee Chairperson Sophie Béjean, President of Campus France.

This paper will present the main lines of work of the StraNES committee and its first diagnostics and proposals, particularly in terms of internationalization of French Higher Education.

The issues of competition - but also of cooperation - between countries, of the relation between internationalization and economic and technological development, and, more generally, of the dynamics of political and cultural influences through academic relations have a central place in the preliminary report. The questions that then arise concern the introduction of new policies and concrete actions to assert our position on the international academic stage.

This also raises a fundamental issue both for the reception of international students in France and the access of the lower-class French students to mobility: the question of the model of internationalization that France should enforce, respecting the humanist and universalist values it claims, not only nationally but also at an European and global scale.