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.
