From the Vocationalization of French University Programs to the Marketization of Students

For about twenty years, the French university programs have been undergoing an acceleration of their vocationalization. Although their loudest spokespersons use to claim their loyalty towards the historic cultural mission of this type of higher education institutions, the universities now compete vigorously to prove the vocational nature of their programs. It appears in their marketing campaign, on their websites or during student fairs, but also in the academic activity itself: through the fabric of programs and of the descriptions given to students, up to the arguments sometimes presented to the latter by their teachers in order to justify the existence of this or that course.

This paper suggests understanding this phenomenon as the manifestation of a renewal of the relationships between higher education and economy – this isn’t a way to affirm that higher education was ever disconnected from economy. The demonstration is based on the analysis of second-hand sources, of university archives and of interviews with academics in physics, law and literature, and members of staff in three French universities.

Firstly, I will show that two dynamics are meeting here. One is determined by the conditions of employment on the labor market and the way they are perceived by academics through different medias: the persistence of unemployment as a public problem and the call for a better match between training and jobs, especially through the development of a rhetoric in terms of skills. The other comes from the increased competition between universities and more generally between higher education institutions for financial resources and for students – hopefully good ones. Both incite academics, still in charge of universities in France, to rally in moral or practical ways behind an ideology of vocationalization, and to shape their programs in vocational terms in a way that depends on how they are touched by the crossing of these two dynamics.

Secondly, I will show furthermore that the students are concerned by a movement aiming at encourage them to act as entrepreneurs of their training and their integration to the labor market. On the one hand, the selection processes to access many university programs contribute to the strengthening of a market of students within higher education. They not only expect academic prerequisite from students, but also extracurricular activities, and, more and more, professional experience. The form of these processes is also important: they look more and more like job interviews. On the other hand, academics, sincerely preoccupied by the competition between graduates on the labor market, or willing to legitimate a teaching that is not claimed to be vocational, express their students injunctions to “sell themselves”.