28 mars 2012

Sur le blog de Michel Abhervé pour Alternatives économiques. Quant on ne se contente pas d’asséner des chiffres établis nulle part comme le fait notre candidat encore président (voir Le retour des 500 000 emplois non pourvus), qui après avoir parlé de 500 000 emplois non pourvus (chiffre repris par Jean-Louis Borloo, dont on croyait pourtant qu’il connaissait le sujet!), met maintenant en avant un demi-million, parce que cela impressionne plus, mais que l’on cherche, sérieusement, où sont les déficits de compétences à venir, il est intéressant de nous appuyer sur une approche européenne.
Le CEDEFOP, Centre Européen pour le Développement de la Formation Professionnelle, vient de publier, en français, une intéressanté étude “L’enjeu des compétences en Europe“, dont le sous titre résume bien le contenu “La demande de compétences ne suit pas l’offre et entraîne un risque accru d’inadéquation de compétences“.
Nous en extrayons une phrase clé “Les pénuries les plus marquées observées dans les secteurs et professions où les travailleurs doivent posséder des compétences hautement spécialisées  comme les sciences de la vie ou les professions intermédiaires de la santé et de l’enseignement”.
On a l’impression que la politqiue conduite ces dernières années en France est bienloin de lutter contre cette tendance et a, au contraire, eu  tendance à l’accentuer: un certain malthusianisme dans l’accès aux professions de santé, comme en témoigne un déficit récurrent d’infirmiers et la réduction de nombre de candidats aux concours de l’enseignement montrant bien où sont les pénuries de compétences  les plus fortes dans notre pays, dans le secteur où cette téude met en évidence un besoin accru de compétences dans les années à venir.
Et pour résoudre celles-ci, qui vont pénaliser notre pays dans les années à venir, la solution est dans la formation initiale et donc dans l’investissement public. Encore faudrait-il considérer celui-ci comme une priorité pour préparer l’avenir et non comme essentiellement une charge.
Voir aussi Europe’s skill challenge et Skills: the global currency of the 21st century.

Wer mobil ist, braucht sich keine Sorgen zu machen, sagt der Hochschulexperte Klaus Landfried.
ZEIT Campus: Herr Landfried, der Deutsche Hochschulverband hat prognostiziert, dass langfristig nur jeder dritte Bachelorabsolvent einen Masterplatz bekommt. Muss man also Angst haben?
Klaus Landfried: Diese Prognose halte ich für Spekulation. Der Hochschulverband ist eine Berufsvertretung von Professoren und promovierten Wissenschaftlern an Unis und als solcher daran interessiert, die Platzzahlen knapp darzustellen. Das erhöht schließlich die Reputation jedes Masterstudiengangs.
ZEIT Campus: Heißt das, die Sorge ist unbegründet?
Landfried: Probleme, einen geeigneten Platz zu finden, haben derzeit nur Bewerber, die sich zu passiv verhalten. Also diejenigen, die sich nur nach den Möglichkeiten an der eigenen Uni erkundigen. Ich halte es für falsch, den Master unbedingt in der Stadt anzustreben, in der man den Bachelor gemacht hat.
ZEIT Campus: Aber früher sind die Magister- oder Diplomstudenten doch auch ein paar Jahre an derselben Uni geblieben.
Landfried: Dieser Vergleich ist ein Denkfehler! Ein Masterstudium ersetzt nicht das frühere Hauptstudium, sondern ist eine neue Qualifikation. Es gibt keinen Rechtsanspruch darauf, an einem Ort »durchzustudieren«. Viele wünschen sich das, weil sie die gewohnte Uni und ihr soziales Umfeld nicht verlassen möchten. Sinnvoll ist das nicht. Schließlich wollen die meisten Arbeitgeber später niemanden, der immer am selben Ort geblieben ist. Wer in Frankfurt einen Bachelor gemacht hat, wird interessanter, wenn er den Master danach in Jena angeht.
ZEIT Campus: Es gibt aber Studiengänge, in denen derzeit fraglos ein Mangel an Masterplätzen herrscht, zum Beispiel in BWL oder Psychologie. Was macht man da?
Landfried: Schauen Sie, welche Nische zu Ihnen passt, und spezialisieren Sie sich – zum Beispiel auf Wirtschaftsrecht, Gesundheitsmanagement oder Unternehmenspsychologie.
ZEIT Campus: Und was sagen Sie Absolventen, die einen Platz in einem besonders beliebten Programm ergattern möchten?
Landfried: Dort, wo es voll ist, muss es nicht gut sein. Ich kann jedem nur raten, die Programme und Professoren genau zu prüfen. Es müssen doch nicht immer die bekannten Massen-Unis sein. Ich kenne eine Reihe von tollen Hochschulen, die händeringend Masterstudenten suchen und um sie werben. Warum nicht als Biologin zum Beispiel nach Cottbus gehen? Dort herrschen wunderbare Bedingungen, die Dozenten haben Zeit für die Studenten, und die Forschung ist überaus ambitioniert. Und BWL-Master gibt’s auch am Niederrhein oder in Sigmaringen.
ZEIT Campus: Eine weitere Möglichkeit wäre, für den Master ins Ausland zu flüchten.
Landfried: Das ist auf jeden Fall eine Überlegung wert. Aber nicht, um zu fliehen, sondern weil ein Studium im Ausland für jeden eine Horizonterweiterung darstellt und später auch beim Berufseinstieg nützt.
ZEIT Campus: Den Zahlen des Deutschen Akade- mischen Austauschdienstes zufolge gehen derzeit nur etwa fünf Prozent der deutschen Bachelorabsolventen für den Master ins Ausland.
Landfried: Viele trauen sich das nicht. Dabei gibt es wunderbare Bedingungen dafür: Internationale Master werden beispielsweise durch das Erasmus-Mundus-Programm von der Europäischen Union großzügig mit Stipendien gefördert. Das nutzen deutsche Studenten viel zu wenig. Für einen Business-Master nach Mailand – das ist doch toll! Oder als Informatikerin nach Nancy! Oder nach Warschau. Überhaupt Mittel- und Osteuropa: In Polen, Tschechien oder Ungarn gibt es sehr gute Hochschulen, an denen fast alles auf Englisch abläuft.
ZEIT Campus: Das Auswahlverfahren für Masterplätze wirkt chaotisch – überall werden unterschiedliche Kriterien angelegt.
Landfried: Wie die aussehen, entscheidet bisher jede Hochschule selbst und jeder Fachbereich für sich. Das Verfahren ist aber immer durch eine Ordnung des Fachbereichs geregelt, die jeder meist online einsehen kann. Im Idealfall haben daran Studenten mitgewirkt.
ZEIT Campus: Was halten Sie davon, dass immer öfter versucht wird, den Masterplatz gerichtlich einzuklagen, weil etwa strittig ist, wie viel die Bachelornote zählen darf?
Landfried: Die meisten Klagen sind unberechtigt. Wenn es an der Hochschule allerdings keine gültige Aufnahme-Ordnung gibt oder diese missachtet wurde, kann ich den Ärger der Studenten schon verstehen.
ZEIT Campus: Vor Kurzem hat ein Gericht für rechtswidrig erklärt, wie die Uni Münster ihre Masterplätze in BWL vergeben hat, weil Bewerbungen nur stichprobenhaft geprüft wurden. Das klingt nach Willkür.
Landfried: Deswegen plädiere ich immer für einen Test der persönlichen und fachlichen Eignung. Natürlich macht das Arbeit, aber es ist eigentlich das Fairste: Im weiterführenden Studium kommt es aufs Können an, und es sollten die zum Zug kommen, deren Kompetenzen zum Programm passen.
ZEIT Campus: Was erwarten Sie noch von Kandidaten für ein Masterstudium?
Landfried: Sie sollten Einfallsreichtum, Willenskraft und Hartnäckigkeit zeigen.
ZEIT Campus: Wie kann man diese Eigenschaften als Bewerber vermitteln?
Landfried: Wer klarmacht, dass er sich sehr genau über den Master informiert hat, punktet auf alle Fälle. Ideal ist, wenn man mit schon aktiven oder ehemaligen Studenten über den Studiengang geredet hat. Auch Gespräche mit Dozenten aus dem Bachelorstudium kann man erwähnen. Das zeigt, dass man sich intensiv damit beschäftigt hat, wie man weiterstudieren möchte.
ZEIT Campus: Von den aktuellen Dozenten braucht man für einige Masterbewerbungen ja ohnehin ein Gutachten.
Landfried: Ja, aber Kontakte zu Dozenten können noch viel mehr bringen als ein nettes Gutachten. Es müssen ja nicht immer Professoren sein, die oft wenig Zeit haben, um auf Bachelorstudenten einzugehen. Auch wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter können viel bewirken: Vielleicht kennen sie an der Wunschhochschule für den Master einen hilfsbereiten Kollegen, den man anrufen kann. Auf einmal hat man eine Kontaktperson, und schon wird die Bewerbung viel leichter.

By Martin Whittaker. As nation states contribute less and less to higher education amid the fallout from the Eurozone crisis, Europe’s universities are anxiously seeking new, sustainable forms of funding.
And increasingly they are looking with interest at England as a model, where the burden of paying for higher education has passed from state to student. From September 2012 England’s universities will begin charging students up to £9,000 (US$14,000) a year in tuition fees. So are fees the future? The sustainability of Europe’s universities was on the agenda at the European University Association’s annual conference at the University of Warwick, UK, on 22-23 March.
According to EUA research, the impact of the economic crisis on public funding of higher education in Europe has so far hit hardest in the UK, Ireland, Latvia, Italy, Greece and Hungary with cuts of over 10%, while countries such as Spain, The Netherlands, Slovakia, Lithuania, Estonia and Romania are not far behind, with cuts of 5-10%. A conference working group on sustainable funding examined several higher education systems in Europe, their experience of introducing tuition fees and some lessons learned.
Professor Sir Steve Smith, vice-chancellor of the University of Exeter, spoke about the politically contentious introduction of fees in England (Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales have separate tuition fee systems).
Tuition fees of £1,000 a year were introduced by the UK’s ‘New Labour’ government for the first time in 1998 against a backdrop of falling state funding and rising student numbers, and student grants were replaced by student loans. In 2006 fees tripled and in 2010, under a new Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition they increased again, with universities allowed to charge between £6,000 and £9,000 a year. And while the UK government expected only the top universities to charge up to the full £9,000, most are now charging this from September 2012. What impact has this had on student numbers, particularly those from poorer backgrounds? Applications generally for 2012-13 are down by 9%, although for the lowest socio-economic group the decrease is just 0.2%, Smith said. He attributes this to the fact that students only begin repaying when their income goes above £21,000 a year.
“The really big change is that funding has moved from the state to the student,” he said. “Government funding for teaching is cut by 80%, the block grant is gone, and it’s the students who now pay up to £9,000. And they increasingly see themselves as customers.”
Austria saw a similar shift from public to student financing of higher education as fees of €350 (US$470) a semester were introduced for the first time in 2001, only to be abolished again in 2009. Christoph Badelt, rector of Vienna University of Economics and Business, said that, after fees were introduced in 2000, student numbers initially dropped but then increased again. “There was no significant impact on student participation as a consequence of the introduction of tuition fees,” he said. Finland lies at the other end of the spectrum on tuition fees to England, with taxpayers footing the bill for all higher education, whether bachelor level, masters or Phd. Students also get around €500 a month in study grants and housing supplements. A 2009 reform created the country’s first two private universities, and they are now running a government pilot, in which they can charge €8,000 for masters students from non-EU countries. Finnish students oppose the trial, believing this to be the thin end of the wedge. Hannu Seristö, vice president of Knowledge Networks, Aalto University, which is running one of the pilots, said rather than application numbers falling with the introduction of fees, generally they have increased.
“The quality of applicants has also gone up,” he said. “Maybe non-European students can’t trust the product that’s free of charge, but when it has a €16,000 price tag it seems like it might be a high-quality product.”
Smith said the new fees regime in England means the power very much lies with the student as consumer. Universities should make sure the library is well stocked and accommodation is good, but more difficult is protecting the academic judgment at the heart of assessment.
“I’m actually quite pleased to see the rise of the student as informed co-creator of knowledge,” he said. “Recently somebody actually said, ‘Do you think it’s right, vice-chancellor, that students should be allowed to comment on the quality of our teaching?’ And I think, ‘They’re paying for this – so yes’.”
The new fee regime is also seeing a change in the way universities view their staff. “There has been a whole generation of scholars who defend themselves as being so good they don’t have to teach,” said Smith. “But now students are paying, suddenly people like myself value enormously pedagogy, especially those who come along and say ‘I really want to teach the first year’.”
Another conference working group, on European funding, heard that universities are being way too optimistic in their expectations of more funding from the EU. Research by the EUA found that three out of four universities expect to get more EU funds in the coming years. Currently contributions from the EU account for just around 3% of European universities’ income.
Jens Oddershede, rector of the University of Southern Denmark and chairman of Universities Denmark, said: “Most governments, certainly in our country, are looking to EU as a way of sorting their own budgetary problems, and 75% of us believe we can attract more funding from the EU. This is probably not possible. I think we are way too optimistic thinking how much funding we can have from the EU.”
Bureaucracy is also a major issue for universities seeking EU funding, the group was told. Thomas Estermann of the EUA told of one university finance department that had to put all other work on hold during several weeks of auditing visits. He expects universities from many more countries to be seeking EU funding in the coming years. “But we think it will be only those who have already invested and already know how to deal with the complexity that will be successful,” he said.

By Sophia Kishkovsky. After it was reported this month that not a single Russian university had cracked The Times Higher Education’s ranking of top 100 schools by academic reputation, Education Minister Andrei Fursenko said that Russia was in the process of creating its own rating system.
A brain drain from Russia has been funneling its brightest minds to the West, while the nation’s embattled higher education system struggles to find its place in the post-Soviet world. Each new rating announcement sets off hand-wringing about the predominance of the United States and the rise of China, both sore points and models for Russia.
“Russia has had some internal debate about their academic community,” Phil Baty, the editor of the Times Higher Education rankings, said by telephone from London. “They have suffered from appalling brain drain, and there is also concern that their scholastic community is isolated.
“There are some schools that are extremely impressive, but it is also struggling, and it’s all down to resources,” Mr. Baty added.
Dr. Fursenko told the Interfax news agency that ratings were an “instrument of competitive battle and influence” and should not be monopolized. He said that Russia was working with international specialists to create its own “international and universally recognized” university rating, Interfax reported this month.
Two days earlier, the Kremlin chief of staff, Sergei Ivanov, said Russia should create its own corruption rating. The Times’s reputation rankings are based on responses by more than 17,000 academics, chosen in part according to Unesco data on the geographic spread of professors around the world. As early as February 2011, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was calling on Dr. Fursenko and his ministry to work out its own ranking of foreign universities.
“You must know that certain experts think that these Western ratings are, in fact, an instrument for raising their competitiveness on the labor market,” Mr. Putin said at their meeting, where they discussed a law that would recognize foreign university diplomas in Russia. “That’s why we need to be very cautious about them, and work out our own objective method of evaluating the quality of education that graduates of these universities receive.”
Last August, Mr. Putin promised 70 billion rubles, or $2.38 billion, for higher education innovation in Russia over the next five years. Dr. Fursenko told Interfax that he would investigate why Russia had fallen on the Times Higher Education lists. Lomonosov Moscow State University, which is known for its mathematics and physical sciences programs, had been ranked 33rd by the Times last year, the first year it compiled a reputation ranking. Only two Russian universities — Moscow State and Saint Petersburg State University — made it onto The Times’s regular Top 400 ranking, placing in the 276-300 and 351-400 bands.
Russians take any blow against Moscow State very personally. It was founded in the 18th century by Mikhail Lomonosov, who is regarded as a Russian Leonardo da Vinci. The Stalin-era skyscraper that serves as its main building is one of the Russian capital’s landmarks, visible for kilometers around, and the vast university serves the function of Harvard, Oxford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology all rolled into one.
Viktor Sadovnichy, the rector of Moscow State, told Nezavisimaya Gazeta, a Moscow newspaper, that the university had suffered in the rankings because the quality of research at universities was weighted over teaching, but that such a year-on-year drop was too precipitous.
It was most likely set off, he said, by respondents being asked a new set of questions. Mr. Sadovnichy told the newspaper that the only question mentioned in the methodology described on The Times Higher Education’s Web site is “Which university would you send your most talented graduates to for the best postgraduate supervision?” which places Russian universities at an immediate disadvantage since there is no official “postgraduate” category in Russia.
In 2009, the Russian government designated a group of research universities for an influx of funds and development, something that China did years ago, said Martin Gilman, who was director of the International Monetary Fund’s Moscow office in the 1990s and has been director of the Higher School of Economics’ Center for Advanced Studies since 2006. The Higher School of Economics, one of the designated research universities and widely regarded as Russia’s most Western-style school, has lured 25 new faculty from the international academic job market — both overseas Russians and foreign-born nationals — with the promise of research opportunities and a smaller teaching burden than they would most likely encounter in the United States. New hires are offered tenure-track positions and the resources to publish and to travel to conferences, which, in turn, raises the university’s international profile, said Dr. Gilman.
The university has been transitioning to teaching and publishing in English, as well as introducing practices like blind peer-reviewed publications that are not yet the norm in Russia.
“We know that this is not going to have big payoffs in the short term in terms of international rankings, but we are hopeful that given our strategy of 2020” — by which time H.S.E. aims to be a world-class research university — “that over the longer term, this will be a much more solid basis in creating the kind of critical mass of faculty in certain disciplines,” Dr. Gilman said.
Russia has been faced with revamping its primary and secondary education systems as well in the wake of the collapse of Communism. The introduction of a standardized college entrance exam similar to the SAT in the United States, has been controversial, but is an important step to introducing national standards in Russia, Dr. Gilman said. On the university level, the social sciences were devastated during the Soviet era and are being built virtually from scratch.
“Those involved in higher education have a formidable challenge in this country because the dead weight of the past is enormous,” Dr. Gilman said.
Yefim Pivovar, rector of the Russian State University for the Humanities, one of the most prestigious liberal arts universities, known as R.G.G.U., said that Russian universities were still far behind in physical infrastructure, which, he said, also affected rankings. He said that R.G.G.U. had been exchanging students with Laval University in Canada for 20 years.
“They have kilometers of underground passageways between buildings,” he said. “We don’t have a single university with such passageways. I’m talking about the material base. I think they have seven rinks for Canadian hockey. That’s what we need to be doing. It’s not a question of ratings, but of the quality of our material base,” he said.
Dr. Pivovar said that Russia could not ignore rankings, but that R.G.G.U.’s 200 exchanges and agreements with schools like the University of California, Berkeley, and the universities of Bochum and Freiburg in Germany also proved its connection to international academia. Joyce Hor-Chung Lau contributed reporting.

Après la remise d'un rapport au ministère en 2010 et après qu'une consultation publique a eu lieu sur le site internet du ministère, il est apparu qu'il existe une demande de formation ad hoc en ce domaine, non seulement de la part des étudiants en formation initiale, obligés de s'expatrier s'ils veulent suivre un cursus complet, mais aussi des professionnels des champs concernés desquels sont exigées des connaissances plus pointues.La criminologie constitue en effet une discipline scientifique à part entière qui aborde le phénomène criminel, ainsi que les réponses que la société lui apporte ou pourrait lui apporter. Elle fait appel à des connaissances et des compétences spécifiques dans des domaines complémentaires comme les sciences de la société, la philosophie, la médecine ou encore le droit. L'objectif de la création d'une section consacrée à la criminologie est ainsi de permettre de fédérer des formations, des recherches et des enseignants-chercheurs et chercheurs qui concernent cette discipline. La France de ce point de vue soutient, jusqu'à présent, mal la comparaison avec les Etats qui ont reconnu la formation en criminologie de même que la profession de criminologue. On peut citer le Canada, l'Allemagne, la Belgique, l'Angleterre à titre d'exemples. L'Université de Cambridge a ainsi été la première à en faire une discipline à part, en créant notamment dès 1959, un Institut de criminologie. La France, en cette matière, peut encore progresser vers la voie de l'excellence qui est la sienne dans de nombreux champs disciplinaires. A cet effet, la création d'une nouvelle section au Conseil national des Universités (CNU) permet de répondre à ce besoin en terme de formation et de recherche, tout en prenant en considération de manière constante les nouveaux besoins disciplinaires qui surgissent.