The French HER system and the issue of evaluation

Abstract

The French higher education and research system is based on a double divide of missions, statuses and recruitment procedures. On one side, over 30 public research organizations – whose permanent scientific staff varies from about 300 to over 12.000 – differentiate themselves from higher education (HE) institutions. On the other, the HE sector itself is made of about 80 universities and about 200 grandes e?coles. The structure of the system results from the French history of universities, which were suppressed as territorial entities then recreated as a collection of disciplinary ‘faculties’ co-managed from Paris and settled in about 13 big cities during the Napoleonic times. Grandes e?coles (named schools below) were created at the turn of the nineteenth century to educate state engineers on a very selective basis. A school of public administration was added to the list in 1945. Business schools were added in the seventies. Research organizations were built up after the Second World War to face the weaknesses of both types higher education institutions in research. Since the 1990s, various reforms have first incrementally contributed to integrate education and research in both schools and universities, then radically pushed towards building consortia or even entering mergers between higher education institutions.