Paris

Philippe Jollant, fed up with yet another boring lecture, stood up in his poetry class at the Sorbonne, swung his brown cloth bag over his shoulder and stalked out to a sunny cafe in this city's Latin Quarter.

"The Sorbonne is like an old chateau, a bit sclerotic," complained Jollant, a twenty-six-year-old modern literature student who's had enough of stuffy professors pushing the classics inside dull-green classrooms without any high-tech study aids.

Even prestigious universities like the Sorbonne, deeply entrenched in centuries-old academic traditions, may have to get with the times and respond to students like Jollant. A new report on higher education in the industrialized world predicts that colleges and universities will have to make sweeping changes in curricula as the ranks of students swell.

Education, once the domain of a privileged few, is democratizing rapidly, says the report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the official think tank for a tiny clique of upper-crust nations.

The ten-nation report praises some U.S. schools -- including colleges and universities in Virginia, as models in adapting to rapid changes. But it says other countries need to rethink postsecondary education to keep Up with advancing technology, accommodate students and fight unemployment with a better-skilled workforce.

Authors of the development organization's study struggled with the question of who should pick up the tab for the changes that the report recommends. Governments are strapped for cash, business involvement has its limits and, in European countries especially, boosting tuition has triggered student unrest.

"Europe is in a real dilemma here," Malcolm Skilbeck, the study s chief author and a former university administrator from Australia, said in an interview. He cited the accepted European tenet that "students should have access to knowledge free of charge."

Among the study's proposals are deferred payments, loans and work-study programs -- measures Europe has yet to widely adopt. But the report, which still needs to be blessed by the development organization's education committee before its scheduled release this fall, could put more pressure on countries to act.