Rezultate remarcabile ale studenţilor ieşeni la “Agronomiada”
Cea mai așteptată competiţie studenţească organizată la nivel naţional de către universitățile agronomice şi-a desemnat câştigătorii celei de a XXXI-a ediţii. StudenţiiUniversităţii de Ştiinţe Agricole şi Medicină Veterinară “Ion Ionescu de la Brad” din Iaşi(USAMV) au reuşit să obţină rezultate excelente în cadrul competiţiei “Agronomiada” 2019, organizată în perioada 9 – 12 mai, la Timișoara.
La concursul profesional-științific și sportiv “Agronomiada” 2019 au participat toate universităţile agronomice din România, Facultăţile de Agricultură şi Horticultură din cadrul Universităţii Craiova și Universitatea Agrară de Stat din Chișinău, în total fiind peste 250 de studenți.
Evenimentul studenţesc, găzduit în acest an de Universitatea de Ştiinţe Agricole şi Medicină Veterinară a Banatului, s-a desfăşuratat pe două secțiuni: teoretică şi sportivă – patru competiţii (fotbal-băieți, volei mixt pe nisip, pescuit sportiv și dans sportiv).
Delegaţia USAMV Iaşi formată din 38 de studenți s-a întors de la această ediţie, cu 19 premii şi trei menţiuni. La disciplinele aflate în concurs, studenţii ieşeni au reuşit să fie pe primul loc la specializările din cadrul agriculturii, horticulturii, industriei alimentare, zootehniei şi medicine veterinare.
Studenţii USAMV Iaşi au reuşit să obţină șase locuri I, șapte locuri II, șase locuri III şi trei menţiuni. Domeniile în care au excelat tinerii ieşeni, au fost: Botanică, Poluarea apei și solului, Agroturism, Semiologie, Controlul calității produselor alimentare de origine vegetală, Managementul resurselor umane în alimentație publică și agroturism. ”Delegația studenților ieșeni prezenți în acest an la cea mai dinamică competiție a universităților agronomice a reușit, pentru prima data, să obțină premii la toate cele 22 de discipline din concurs, ceea ce este un rezultat foarte bun, având în vedere că au fost 38 de studenți participanți. Universitatea Agronomică din Iași își va recompensa suplimentar studenții cu premii în bani”, a punctat prof. univ. dr. Vasile Stoleru, prorector cu activități sociale, studențești și relații alumni.
Publicație: Evenimentul
Blind student facing deportation says university reneged on support
Bamidele Chika Agbakuribe sold his home in Nigeria to pay fees to Dundee University
Bamidele Chika Agbakuribe with his wife, Emanuella. Photograph: Robert Perry
Dundee University took tens of thousands of pounds from a blind Nigerian PhD student in return for what it promised him would be “state of the art” disabled facilities if he came to the UK with his young family to complete his studies.
Instead, Bamidele Chika Agbakuribe, who is totally blind, claims the university gave him failing IT equipment and repeatedly obstructed his studies to the extent he was not able to complete his work. When he complained, they failed him and cancelled his student status, he says. The university then contacted the Home Office, which has said it will deport Agbakuribe and his family on 5 June.
Agbakuribe said he always planned to leave the UK after his studies finished at Dundee’s School of Education and Social Work. But if he is forced to return to Nigeria without his PhD certificate, he will have to repay the tens of thousands of pounds his sponsor gave him to come to the UK.
Because Agbakuribe sold his house in Nigeria to help pay for his university fees, he, his wife and four young children would be left destitute on their return.
“What has happened to me is enough to kill a person. As a blind academic, I received a lot of support in Nigeria. I was respected for my achievements and inspired others,” he said.
“I had such high hopes of Scotland, to study at this university. The university received tens of thousands of pounds from myself and my sponsor. But despite the promises, I received no such support, not even proper supervision, and in the final analysis, they branded me a failure.
“I have never been allowed to state my case. This is the most shocking part. I am expected to stay quiet and go back home.”
The Guardian has seen testimony from another blind student at Dundee University who alleges similar treatment.
Robina Qureshi, the chief executive of Positive Action in Housing, a homelessness and human rights charity, said: “Agbakuribe’s story is a universal one. The evidence in this case begs for a public inquiry by the Scottish parliament so that lessons can be learnt. It is a damning indictment.”
Qureshi alleges Dundee University “enticed” Agbakuribe to come to the UK by promising him the latest disabled facilities, a sighted guide and frequent academic supervision.
Instead, she claims, it gave him IT equipment that did not work, took away his guide after a few weeks, failed to supervise him – he went more than a year without academic supervision at one time, and more than six months without supervision at another – and isolated him from his peers by forcing him to sit in a different room.
The university denied these claims in a press release, saying: “The decision to terminate the student’s studies was made solely on the basis of a lack of academic progress against a background of extensive and dedicated support.”
The university said it could not comment on the allegations by the second student because “we have not been made aware of the details, without which it is impossible to investigate”. Dundee said it takes all such complaints seriously and encourages students to use a complaints-handling procedure.
Between 2016 and 2018, the university threatened Agbakuribe with deportation when he tried to complain about the situation, claims Qureshi, who said she has read more than 7,500 emails between Agbakuribe and the university. “They mentioned it constantly. The evidence is utterly damning,” she said.
Dundee said: “The university provides support to all overseas students … includ[ing] making students aware of their obligations under their visa and how they relate to their academic progress, and the possible consequences which may arise if these are not met. The university does not consider this advice as threats but as guidance.”
Agbakuribe is supported by his local MSP, Joe FitzPatrick, members of the University and College Union’s national executive committee as well as its Dundee University branch, and the Scottish TUC.
Other high-profile supporters include Dr Carlo Morelli, the president-elect of the UCU in Scotland, Aamer Anwar, the rector of Glasgow University, Dr Marion Hersh from Glasgow University, and the former Scottish government minister Malcolm Chisholm.
Qureshi said: “We want Bamidele to be allowed to appeal to the university and be properly represented, failing which, we will have no alternative but to take this matter up with the Equality and Human Rights Commission [and] the information commissioner, and call on John Swinney, [the] education minister, and the Scottish government to hold a public inquiry.”
Publicație : The Guardian
Warwick University to lower entry grades for disadvantaged pupils
Warwick Scholars programme will also include bursaries and support for local applicants
Warwick University is to launch an ambitious effort to recruit disadvantaged students from within its region, with a package of measures including financial support, reduced admissions barriers and aid to local schools.
The university says it is prepared to spend £10m a year on the programme, named Warwick Scholars, to improve the admissions prospects of talented students from deprived areas or underrepresented groups living within a 30-mile radius of its campus.
Warwick’s programme is the first significant response by a Russell Group university to the higher education regulator’s recent call for universities in England to improve access using contextual admissions, which adjust entry requirements based on a student’s background and family circumstances.
Stuart Croft, Warwick’s vice-chancellor, said the university was prepared to lower its required A-level entry requirements by as much as four grades, based on evidence that the university has collected on previous admissions policies over the last six years.
“Students from less advantaged backgrounds and less successful schools simply can’t get to a place like Warwick, so we’re trying to calibrate what works,” said Croft.
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“We have traditionally used a two-grade reduction and that has worked to some extent but quite clearly the feedback is that four grades would make an enormous difference, so we are going down that road and doing this in a very careful, evidenced way.”
The reduction would mean that an offer for a place on Warwick’s economics course, which currently requires an A* and two As, could be as low as BBB.
Alongside the reduced entry grades, the university will give a 50% tuition fee discount in each year of study and a means-tested support bursary worth £2,000 a year – a total package worth nearly £20,000 for students on a three-year undergraduate course. Students would also be eligible for other bursaries.
Earlier this year, the Office for Students urged English universities to make greater use of contextual offers to increase their intake of disadvantaged and underrepresented young people. Croft said that his university’s experience was that students admitted under such programmes did just as well.
“We’ve found that there is no statistical evidence at all that students who come in through those routes do worse than students who come through traditional routes, on the work we’ve done with our own students over the last six years. It makes us confident for us to scale up in this kind of way,” Croft said.
Likely students will be identified by teachers based on academic potential and GCSE performance, and the programme will be open to all UK-based pupils attending sixth forms and colleges within the target area, which includes Coventry, Warwickshire, parts of Solihull and Birmingham, and Leicester.
Other criteria include having been in local authority care, being eligible for free school meals, living in a deprived area, or other “significant extenuating circumstances” such as being a young carer, or having disabilities or long-term illness.
While still at school, the scholars will receive individual tuition from current undergraduates and regular meetings with the department where they hope to apply, as well as residential courses and a “revision bootcamp” before A-levels.
Croft said the geographical limit was based on the “natural commuting area” around the university, with previous research showing that students from less advantaged backgrounds are three times more likely to live at home and commute.
“In our region we are not successful enough at supporting young people with talent. When they are successful, we lose far too many of those students to London. So one of the things we want to do is try to help build a cohort of people who succeed and stay in the region, and contribute to its social and economic success,” Croft said.
The first sixth formers to take part will be announced this summer, for enrolment in 2020. The university said that when running at full capacity the programme will cost almost £10m annually in fee discounts and bursaries.
Publicație: The Guardian
UK progress on research spending goal ‘26 years behind schedule’
CBI warns country will not spend 2.4 per cent of gross domestic product on research and development until 2053
An ambitious target to raise UK research and development spending to 2.4 per cent of gross domestic product will not be reached until 2053 at the current rate of progress, business leaders have warned.
The government set itself the goal of reaching this level of public and private sector spending by 2027 in its industrial strategy two years ago, with the aim of eventually increasing this to 3 per cent of GDP.
But progress has been slow, and both industry and universities have complained of the difficulties involved in setting up successful collaborations. Now, the Confederation of British Industry says that the UK risks falling short of that target by 26 years.
In a report published on 14 May, The Changing Nature of R&D, the CBI calls on the government to “take the lead” in meeting the 2.4 per cent investment target by “publishing a comprehensive roadmap”, enabling industry leaders to work more efficiently towards that goal.
The report, published by the CBI with the University of Leeds for the launch of the institution’s £40 million Nexus innovation hub, makes a number of recommendations to alter this trajectory.
With research and development experiencing a shift towards software and services, industry-led research must make better use of data and “exploit opportunities to access new data”, the report suggests.
The establishment of a new “business advisory group” for public funding overseer, UK Research and Innovation, could also help to inform strategy, the report suggests, and “help ensure that innovation support is keeping pace with business priorities and needs”.
Universities should also act to increase the visibility of opportunities for businesses to connect, making collaborations simpler, the report concludes.
Lisa Roberts, deputy vice-chancellor for research and innovation at Leeds, said that improved harnessing of data would “supercharge R&D” for businesses. She also stressed “the vital role universities have to play in supporting innovation and productivity…There has never been a better time for universities and businesses to collaborate to ensure we meet the 2.4 per cent target.”
Earlier this month, Chris Skidmore, the universities and science minister called for a change in attitude surrounding science and innovation across higher education and industry. For the 2.4 per cent target to be reached by 2027, he said, “we need to stop talking about jobs outside academia as being ‘second-choice careers’ or ‘Plan B options’”.
An additional 260,000 researchers will be needed to work in R&D across universities and businesses if the UK is to meet its targets, he added.
Publicație : The Times
Universities told to refund half of fees over strike failings
Office of the Independent Adjudicator says some English and Welsh providers did not do enough for students when lecturers walked out over pensions
UK universities that did not do enough to mitigate the impact of last year’s pensions strike on students’ learning have been ordered to refund about half the value of the teaching hours missed.
The rulings by the sector ombudsman for England and Wales, the Office of the Independent Adjudicator, potentially open the door to more payouts for students who are still locked in disputes with their universities linked to the 14-day walkout over changes to the Universities Superannuation Scheme.
The OIA said in its annual report last month that it received about 50 complaints during 2018 that were linked to the industrial action, but it ruled that more than a third of these were ineligible because the students involved had yet to exhaust the internal appeals process at their institution. That tally of complaints has now risen to 80.
Publishing a fresh batch of case summaries on 14 May, the adjudicator set out how it had considered whether universities had made efforts to mitigate the academic impact of lost teaching and whether they had tried to make up for lost learning opportunities.
Where providers were judged to have not gone far enough, the OIA’s “starting point” was to recommend that they refund 50 per cent of students’ tuition fees for the affected period.
Most universities have “gone to some lengths” to ensure that students were not academically disadvantaged, said Felicity Mitchell, the independent adjudicator.
But some “have been better than others” at finding ways to make up for the learning that students have missed out on, by providing lecture recordings and podcasts, for example.
“Others have done nothing, and we don’t think that’s fair,” Ms Mitchell said. “We have made recommendations in a number of cases for partial refunds of tuition fees and payments for distress and inconvenience where we have decided the student has not been treated fairly.”
Of 19 case summaries published so far, the OIA has ruled that nine complaints were partly justified and that seven were not justified. Two were not eligible, and one was settled.
In one of the newly published summaries, an international student on a one-year master’s programme complained about missed teaching hours, and the OIA recommended that the university offer to refund £1,284 in tuition fees.
In another, a student in the final year of an undergraduate course complained they had paid for lectures and seminars that were not provided, and the OIA recommended that the university offer to refund tuition fees of £631.
Sarah Liddell, head of the leadership office at the OIA, said that each case was considered “on its merits as a whole” rather than applying a “fixed rule”, but there was a “starting point” of a 50 per cent refund.
If a student was in their first year, for example, the OIA might take the view that they had more opportunity to make up for the lost learning than someone who had already completed their course and would therefore reduce the suggested refund.
Students have a year to bring complaints to the OIA after exhausting their university’s internal procedure.
Publicație : The Times
Is China’s Belt and Road Initiative boosting academic links?
Data on the growth of scholarly collaboration across Asia, the Middle East and eastern Europe suggest Beijing’s grand strategy could be having an impact
China’s Belt and Road project, which is aimed at strengthening its ties with the rest of Asia and beyond, may be primarily about transport and infrastructure.
Since its launch in 2013, the £750 billion project – sometimes described as the 21st-century Silk Road in a nod to the ancient trading route between East and West – has poured money into schemes that aim to improve links between China, Europe, the Middle East and Africa by road, rail and sea.
But it arguably is also the catalyst for a ramping-up of higher education links between China, its nearest neighbours and nations even further afield.
According to data on the amount of academic publications indexed in Elsevier’s Scopus database that feature co-authors from different countries, some of the biggest growth in collaborative research involving China is in other parts of Asia, eastern Europe and north Africa.
For instance, leaving aside countries with the smallest co-authored research output with China (those with fewer than 1,000 co-authored papers between 2013 and 2017), nine nations increased their collaborative research with China by more than 100 per cent in the period 2013-17. All but one (Chile) were along the Belt and Road route.
And just behind them are two of the biggest countries within the Belt and Road sphere of influence – India and Russia – whose research collaborations with China ballooned by more than 90 per cent.
So does this apparent expansion of research links have its roots in the Belt and Road strategy, or does it simply reflect the kind of organic growth that might be expected of developing countries in geographic proximity?
Mike Gow, lecturer in international business at Coventry University’s School of Strategy and Leadership, said it was likely that Belt and Road was playing a part.
“The Belt and Road Initiative is largely known for infrastructure projects, but the promotion of HE collaborations and research that informs [the scheme] is certainly a feature of initiatives and activities across Chinese HE,” he said.
Dr Gow said that the Chinese government might not dictate exactly how universities should build Belt and Road academic links, but it would expect institutions to detail in their five-year plans how their internationalisation projects fed into the initiative’s overarching strategy.
As a result, universities keen to contribute to the strategy might make money available for scholars who collaborate along the Belt and Road route, even if there is no major central fund for academics tied to the initiative.
“They have given universities some kind of headspace to try to think about how they might want to engage with [Belt and Road],” said Susan Robertson, professor of the sociology of education at the University of Cambridge. “There have been funds made available for them to develop their own transnational strategies.”
On the academic side of Belt and Road, she noted, much of the focus – although not all – had been around arts, social science and humanities subjects because of an “absolute awareness” in China that the country needed to bolster creative subjects. There was also a sense that China wanted to “present to the world” the positive contribution it could make to such fields, Professor Robertson added.
Dr Gow said that there were specific schemes aimed at building Belt and Road higher education links, although these were often simply programmes to facilitate academic networks rather than major funding schemes in their own right.
One of the most prominent is the University Alliance of the Silk Road (UASR), established in 2015 and now claiming to involve 150 universities across 38 countries, mainly those along the immediate Belt and Road route but also institutions from as far away as the US.
The only UK institution that is part of the alliance, and a member of its executive council, is the University of Liverpool. Its involvement grew out of its partnership with Xi’an Jiaotong University (the two institutions have a joint campus in Suzhou near Shanghai). Xi’an Jiaotong was central to setting up the UASR because it is located in the central Chinese city of Xi’an, the historic starting point of the ancient Silk Road.
Dinah Birch, pro vice-chancellor for cultural engagement at Liverpool, said that although the UASR was not a scheme on a “huge scale”, it had opened doors to academics working in similar fields in different nations. Liverpool had been closely involved in fostering links between scholars working in cultural heritage fields, for instance, and it hosted a round-table event last year on the topic.
The result, she said, was that the “intellectual and physical traffic” along the Belt and Road route had been increased, something especially true for countries that were previously quite isolated, such as Kazakhstan.
“We are not talking about something that has been transformative, but it has been a valuable channel for conversation, particularly perhaps with central Asian countries,” she said.
There has also been a benefit for students, Professor Birch said, who had the chance to attend summer schools in China set up as part of the UASR initiative and wider opportunities to learn more about Chinese culture, language and higher education.
Student mobility more generally is another aspect of the wider higher education strategy for Belt and Road, with China seemingly on course to hit an ambitious goal of hosting half a million international students by 2020.
Countries along the Belt and Road route seem to be enjoying a new surge of interest from international students, too, data from Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings indicate.
But even if the Belt and Road strategy is driving much of this increasing academic and student mobility – as well as facilitating the flow of ideas – are there political barriers that will limit its expansion, not least lingering suspicions that the Belt and Road Initiative is simply a foreign policy tool to expand China’s global influence?
Dr Gow said although the wider Belt and Road project might have clear soft power goals for China, as long as the initiative remained a priority for Beijing then it was likely to generate cross-border research activity through the way it encouraged Chinese institutions and academics to compete for resources.
“Most research collaboration between [China] and other countries is a scholar-to-scholar arrangement, focused on producing outputs valuable to the scholars themselves,” he pointed out.
Professor Robertson said the fact that this academic dialogue had been opened up along the Belt and Road could help to act as an antidote to any mistrust between West and East. “There has to be a degree of openness; that is an integral part of higher education,” she said.
It is one reason why, according to Professor Birch, it would be a shame if schemes such as the UASR “withered” away at some point if global political developments went in a different direction.
“I do believe that in these tense…times there is benefit in the academics working at the coalface continuing to talk to each other. I think that is what we need. I would feel anxious about a growing academic culture where everyone is closing the door and locking it,” she said.
Publicație : The Times
Research assessment in New Zealand could be marked down
A review following the latest iteration of the PBRF could lead to radical changes that undermine the gains made, warns Roger Smyth
The results of New Zealand’s six-yearly assessment of university research performance, the Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF), were released on 30 April. Assessment panels studied evidence portfolios compiled by about 8,000 academics across New Zealand’s eight universities and rated the research performance of each.
As in the three previous PBRF rounds, the universities of Auckland and Otago, which house New Zealand’s two medical schools, were assessed as having the largest number of staff producing high-quality research. Between them, Auckland and Otago employ 53 per cent of the university staff who earned an A grade (meaning that they are deemed world class). As a result, they capture half the quality assessment funding distributed on the basis of the PBRF, amounting to NZ$315 million (£160 million) a year.
But that is only part of the story. In assessing research performance, scale matters. Auckland is by far New Zealand’s biggest university by any measure: revenue, staff or student numbers. But controlling for staff numbers, Wellington’s Victoria University ranks first, meaning that it has the highest concentration of research staff and the lowest proportion of staff who didn’t meet the standard for being rated. Otago rates second and Auckland fourth.
Controlling for student numbers, meanwhile, sees Lincoln University (New Zealand’s smallest university by every measure) rank first, with Otago second and Auckland third.
The release of the results from this fourth round captured less public attention than earlier rounds, with few stories making the non-education media. This is partly because, 16 years on, the PBRF has lost its novelty. It also reflects the fact that it is no longer possible to rank universities by subject, reducing the scope for them to boast.
This change from previous rounds is one consequence of a major review of the PBRF conducted in 2012-13 in response to longstanding complaints about the exercise’s high transaction costs and the opportunities it presented for universities to “game-play”. But despite the resulting simplification of the system – not to mention the tweaks following the evaluations that followed the first two PBRF iterations – the government has now commissioned yet another review.
Already under way, this is the result of a manifesto commitment made by the incoming Labour-led coalition government in 2017. Radical change – or complete abolition – of the PBRF has long been an article of faith for New Zealand’s Tertiary Education Union (TEU), and its officials worked hard in the run-up to the election to make sure that the Labour party knew its view.
In response to the latest results, TEU president Michael Gilchrist reiterated the union’s complaints about compliance costs, despite the system’s simplification. He acknowledged that the PBRF had increased the focus of academics on research but added that “after four gruelling rounds of individual assessments those benefits are well past”. He also complained that the refocusing had come at the expense of teaching and had damaged locally focused research.
The union, in addition, has always been concerned that the PBRF assesses each individual academic staff member’s research. Many staff have argued that the “unit of analysis” in any research assessment should be research groups or academic departments – or anything other than the individual staff member.
But reputation and prestige are powerful motivators and there is little doubt that making the individual staff member the unit of analysis changed the focus of most academics’ work – making research a priority for many. Ministry of Education analysis shows that, as a result, the introduction of the PBRF saw an increase in the quality and quantity of research. New Zealand universities boosted both their share of the world’s premium publications and their share of global citations. Those gains increased, moreover, as the PBRF bedded in. And, whatever the union might argue, there is no evidence of any fall-off in the quality of teaching.
The complaints and the lobbying have continued unabated, however. Will the new review lead to the complete overhaul sought by the TEU? And if so, will that come at the expense of rising research performance? Watch this space.
Publicație : The Times
Academics ‘should upload research contracts alongside papers’
Call follows revelations about Coca-Cola’s influence over some sponsored research
Fresh questions have been raised over whether academic conflict of interest statements are adequate after a study found that Coca-Cola has the power to pull the plug without reason on some of its sponsored research projects.
Using freedom of information powers, academics uncovered details of the sway the soft drinks manufacturer holds over health research that it helps to fund, including at five public institutions in the US and Canada.
This includes the “right to comment on papers prior to publication” and the “ability to terminate studies at any time without reasons”, potentially giving it the power to halt research producing unfavourable results or to exert pressure on scientists carrying out their work.
Sponsors could tell academics “if you don’t take our comments, we can pull the study without reason and take all the data”, warned Sarah Steele, an author of the study and a senior research associate at the University of Cambridge. In one instance, Coca-Cola terminated a project and “little or no information” was sent to researchers, the study found.
The investigation, published in the Journal of Public Health Policy, concludes that the findings add to concerns that existing conflict of interest statements are of “limited usefulness” because they do not spell out the full extent of corporate influence over a research project.
Currently, such statements often merely acknowledge that research has been “supported by” a particular company, explained Dr Steele.
Instead, academics who produce papers involving work funded by corporations such as Coca-Cola should be required to upload their research contracts alongside their articles when they publish, she said.
Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, and a prominent campaigner on scientific conflicts of interest, said that this new investigation had shown that existing conflict statements were “less than truthful”.
“At the moment, I see many professional journals not taking [conflicts of interest] seriously, thereby giving researchers licence not to disclose,” she said. “But the real issue is keeping industry funders completely out of the research process. Research ought to be investigator initiated and controlled. Otherwise, it’s marketing research, not science,” Professor Nestle added.
A spokeswoman for Coca-Cola pointed out that the investigation had acknowledged that there was “no evidence” that the company had pulled research projects to quash unfavourable findings or had exerted pressure on researchers.
In 2016, after a string of newspaper investigations into its backing for research that shifted blame for obesity away from eating and drinking habits, Coca-Cola said it would no longer fund more than half the costs of health research projects.
Publicație : The Times
Nouveaux territoires, nouveaux étudiants : l’enseignement supérieur privé gagne du terrain
Universités catholiques, écoles privées, instituts… Les effectifs de l’enseignement supérieur privé ne cessent de croître depuis le milieu des années 1990. Sans que l’Etat ait trouvé une manière fiable de garantir la qualité de ces cursus.
Rose Vaillant ne connaissait pas l’Université catholique de Paris avant qu’un de ses enseignants ne lui en parle, en terminale. « Je n’étais pas du tout dans cette ambiance-là, j’ai fait toute ma scolarité dans le public », confie l’étudiante parisienne de 19 ans. Sa visite du campus de la « Catho » et la possibilité de faire une prépa intégrée pour entrer dans un Institut d’études politiques achèvent de la convaincre. Sur Parcoursup, elle demande une double licence en histoire et sciences politiques. Fait chou blanc à la Sorbonne, malgré ses bons résultats scolaires, mais reçoit une réponse positive de l’Institut catholique. Six mois plus tard, elle se dit ravie, souhaite rester à la « Catho » pendant toute sa licence, et verra en master si elle retourne dans le public… ou pas.
Ces allers-retours entre public et privé sont désormais fréquents. Universités catholiques, écoles sous tutelle des chambres de commerce, écoles privées sous statut associatif ou dépendant de sociétés à but lucratif… Un étudiant sur cinq est inscrit dans l’enseignement supérieur privé, soit 520 200 étudiants en 2017, selon les derniers chiffres ministériels.Depuis 1998, les effectifs du privé ont augmenté de 76 %, soit 191 000 étudiants supplémentaires ; dans le même temps, le public a connu une croissance de 6 %. Si bien que la part de l’enseignement supérieur privé atteint 19 %. Et ce sur tout le territoire. Dans les académies de Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon, Nantes, Nice, Paris ou Versailles, le privé rassemble même de 20 % à 30 % des étudiants.
Cette croissance n’est pas cantonnée à la France. L’enseignement supérieur privé accueille un étudiant sur trois au niveau mondial, selon un rapport de l’Inspection générale de l’administration de l’éducation nationale et de la recherche (IGAENR) de 2015. La raison en est simple : « L’impossibilité matérielle pour les gouvernements de faire face à l’accroissement massif de la demande d’enseignement supérieur par un effort public supplémentaire », constatent les inspecteurs. Gilles Roussel, président de la Conférence des présidents d’université (CPU), ne dit pas autre chose : « Malheureusement, l’université française, avec son 1,6 million d’étudiants, ne bénéficie pas des moyens qui lui permettraient d’accueillir encore plus de monde. » Alors, c’est le privé qui s’en charge.
Publicație : Le Monde