The Success of Apprenticeships

5Reinventing the Promise of Work-linked Training… Or an Initiatory Journey Towards Agile Professionalism and Postural Learning

5.1. A study of the efficiency of French post-baccalaureate business schools

5.1.1. Introduction

The higher education system is one of the pillars of a country’s socioeconomic system, because it contributes to the dynamics of knowledge acquisition, capitalization and mobilization, as well as to the development of sustainable comparative advantages, and ultimately strengthens national competitiveness.

Nowadays, institutional pressures in the higher education ecosystem are becoming increasingly strong: they relate to market forces (starting with the accentuation of competition among institutions with organizational impacts, a weakening of the academic fabric, bankruptcies, as well as alliances, mergers and acquisitions, etc.), as well as political decisions, dictated by a neoliberal culture, making one of its hallmarks the withdrawal of the welfare state from the education sector (and its consequence, which is partial privatization).

However¹, assessing the efficiency of higher education institutions – private and public – is a priority for both governments and the institutions themselves. This is because it is at the junction of new institutional injunctions, pushing for standardization and accreditation on a global scale – the market being appreciated here as a founding institution of what the socioeconomist Karl Polanyi (1983) called a market society ...