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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2014

Systems of Higher Education and Research in the Maghreb region

Les systèmes d'enseignement supérieur et de recherche au Maghreb

Résumé

Maghreb countries - Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia - have very old higher education systems. Their missions are cultural conservation/reproduction and the formation of the elites for positions of power and the running of society. However, from the XIX century, under the impact of colonization, these systems have been disqualified in favor of new so called “modern” systems, all the more integrated into the international division of labor. This integration has resulted in significant changes in the tasks, the contents and the administration of those higher education systems. After independence - in the 1950s and 1960s - "modern" systems have been renewed by the United Nations and developed according to national objectives: training of people to work for the State and the administration, training of technicians and engineers for industry and agriculture, and finally legitimation of political power. Under the influence of several factors - social demand, educational expansion, economic crisis and under-graduate employment - these systems were in crisis in the 1980s and the question of reform arose simultaneously with the question of socio-economic choices. With the interventions of international financial organizations - the IMF and the World Bank in particular - the liberal model was favored. In this context, since the early 2000s, the discourse of European and North African leaders around the 'modernization' of higher education and the "knowledge society" was used to justify the introduction of a series of reforms from the Bologna process. Those reforms are aimed at offering a training offer open to its economic environment through the LMD system, introducing quality assurance procedures, developing R & D with a focus on public-private partnerships, diversifying funding and finally, modernizing governance through tools and standards from the New Public Management. A decade later, these reforms have transformed the shape of these systems, professionalized training and created structures for R & D and university-industry collaboration. However, at the education level, the quality assurance process is barely sketched, the ratios teachers/students widely differ depending on the country, all universities are facing a significant students’ expansion. In the research area, R & D is not widespread, public research is not requested by local businesses and graduates are still struggling to find a place in the labor market. But more fundamentally, some questions arise: how is it that a movement of more reforms goes hand in hand with less hope among teachers and lecturers? How to modernize higher education systems whose governance has been criticized by users? Finally, is it possible to reconcile autonomy as envisaged by the Bologna process with university autonomy?
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Dates et versions

hal-01502615 , version 1 (05-04-2017)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-01502615 , version 1

Citer

Ahmed Ghouati. Systems of Higher Education and Research in the Maghreb region. Joshi and Paivandi. ‘Higher Education across Nations’, Editions B.R. Publishing Corporation, 2014. ⟨hal-01502615⟩

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