The financial situation of French universities is very worrying, even if higher education and research see their budget increase in the current context… For the moment, since everything will depend on votes in Parliament. Beyond the question of means, it is the mode of management of universities that must be questioned, and in particular the measures inspired by new public management which has revealed its impasses. A new management must be invented.
30% of French universities were in deficit in 2023 (60% will probably be in 2024). The objectives of the LRU law (Freedoms and Responsibilities of Universities) relating to their financial autonomy now appear very far from us. French universities are increasingly dependent on the state budget and reversible funding. Due to a lack of financial visibility, they often have to carry out significant austerity measures to keep their activities afloat. At a time when their budgets will be discussed in the National Assembly as part of the adoption of the state budget, the economic model of these universities raises questions.
Management principles dating back 40 years
The LRU wanted to apply the precepts of NPM to French universities (New Public Management). The ideological bases of this mode of management developed first, in the 1980s, in the United Kingdom (Thatcher government), in municipal administrations in the United States (for example, Sunnyvale in California) then in public administrations in New Zealand and Australia.
At the beginning of the 1990s, public management researchers synthesized the founding principles of NPM, for example Hood Or Osborne and Gaebler. They are mainly based on the separation of the steering and control functions of administrations and operational functions, the creation of autonomous administrative units, the control of these units by results, the monitoring of objectives included in contractual programs and the use of market “mechanisms” as a mode of internal regulation.
From 2007, French universities have seen these principles applied, notably through the LRU law and the transition to expanded responsibilities and skills (RCE). On an economic and managerial level, the impact is felt at at least two levels:
The economic model of French universities has therefore become particularly dependent on performance indicators based mainly, as in heavy industry or mass distribution, on production volumes (pedagogical, scientific, partnership). But as many university presidents say, university management based on ratios per student or by searcher no longer works.
Our work indicate that in French public organizations, the desire to respect the fundamental principles of public service management (quality, continuity, adaptability or equal access) remains but it has less and less impact on the economic model of these organizations. In many countries that were the first to adopt the precepts of NPM (United Kingdom, United States, Netherlands, Japan), its critical analysis has enabled the construction of a post-NPM public management recommending, for example, for universities , L’university self-management and the governance shared between several stakeholders.
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In France, instead of considering these new post-NPM managerial principles, as had previously been done with those of the NPM, successive governments have kept French universities in a regime conditioning their resources on respecting contracts or obtaining grants. exceptional financing which calls into question, almost every year, their financial capacities and their development.
Constrained financial capacities
For 2025, the spending ceiling granted to higher education and research is planned identical to that of 2024 (at a little more than €31 billion) but excluding inflation and excluding additional budgetary effort, the exact amount of which will be defined during the next vote on the finance law. This new limitation on spending dedicated to French public universities firstly questions their economic model.
This is based on a very regulated regime of autonomy which often requires their management to “beg for alms” from their supervisory authority (the Ministry of Higher Education and Research) and, by extension, from their staff. to carry out the same approach with their hierarchy or external funders (companies, other ministries, international institutions). A mission on the economic model of universities, common to the general inspectorates of education (IGESR) and finance (IGF), is underway but the problem is also managerial and organizational.
The current model is defended for its ability to retain the specificities of the French university system (independence of universities and academics, equality of service and access to universities, free studies, etc.). However, by combining public management principles (reception of all students, autonomy of researchers and teachers, continuity and equality of services) and private management principles (management by results, development of universities’ own resources, optimization of the number of students), “managerial hybridization” that NPM imposes puts universities and their staff faced with paradoxical injunctions that are often insoluble (“be autonomous but report on your activities”, “provide a public service but seek private funding”, “welcome everyone but improve the average level of your graduates”…).
Faced with these paradoxes, some universities call on the higher education department (DGESIP) and the IGESR to help them and financially redress their accounts, but the problem seems deeper. The economic and managerial model prescribed to them seems to be gradually moving away from the public management models now built for many university systems in the world and which are based on more current managerial postulates and adaptable to university constraints.
The necessary adaptation of economic and managerial models
To adapt to contextual constraints but also common to all higher education and research operators, many university systems have drawn inspiration from the reflections and analyzes produced by international research in public management over the past 30 years: public value management (public value management), management by activities (activity-based view), streamlining the architecture of activities (cost/revenue architecture), the new public governance (new public governance).
These approaches make it possible to respond, in a flexible manner, to complex situations, in particular by organizing the management activities of public universities (governance, educational management, research management, fundraising, premises management, etc.) not as independent functions but like nested processes focused on value creation partnerships that can take social, societal, cultural, environmental, economic, democratic and civic forms.
These new approaches do not necessarily suggest reducing the public resources made available to universities but rather managing them differently. Indeed, contrary to popular belief, France is far from being the country which devotes the most public money to its universities (a just under 80% of their budgets). The Scandinavian countries and even Germany, whose virtues in public management are often praised, finance well over 80% of the budget of their higher education establishments, sometimes over 90% (for Finland and Norway). . However, in France, public decision-makers in matters of higher education continue to ask universities to apply economic and managerial recipes that are highly questioned elsewhere.
The problem would be less serious if, despite the deficits, these revenues were ultimately the only ones able to respond to the specificities of the French university system (free studies, non-selection of students or even educational and scientific independence). However, that’s not even the case anymore. Many universities adopt differentiated registration fees or more or less official systems of student selection. Their diplomas are mainly evaluated on their professional dimensions and their teacher-researchers can often only develop their work by adapting to the research market and its financiers.
Thus, it would not seem completely inappropriate to take a closer look at public management approaches that seem to work elsewhere rather than too regularly brandishing the alibi of “French academic exception”. This undoubtedly exists and that’s so much the better. But it is not certain that maintaining, in an NPM logic, the economic and managerial model of universities is very favorable to this exception. Some go so far as to predict its future disappearance with that of universities!
Experiment above all
If they have not already done so, public and ministerial decision-makers could experiment, for example, with models of public value creation or public service motivation at universities, reconfiguration of architecture, shared governance. or even meta-governance applied in many university systems abroad.
Conceptual approaches often designed or at least developed in French universitiesand taught to their students, but, paradoxically, little applied within them…
It is not certain that these approaches are completely adapted to the management of the French university system. But management and management are above all experimental disciplines and sciences, before possibly being normative. In these times of financial austerity, it would therefore perhaps not be useless to take these approaches into consideration, as many university systems around the world have been able to do, often adapting them to their contexts and continuously enriching the model. economic and managerial aspects of their universities.
