Academic retirement rush set to drive reshaping of French sector

A steep increase in retirements among French academics is set to push forward the reshaping of the country’s higher education sector, giving presidents renewed freedom to make strategic decisions about the future of their university.

The Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation has predicted that the proportion of academics leaving their post every year will rise by the end of the decade from 2.2 per cent – the rate seen over the past three years – to 2.9 per cent. The increase is set to be even sharper in the sciences, from 1.6 per cent to 2.7 per cent, with retirements the main driver across the board.

This follows a decade during which departures had fallen sharply, although the funding increase over the same period – 8 per cent, according to European University Association data – has been too little to keep pace with student numbers or inflation.

Julien Gossa, an analyst of higher education policy and associate professor in computer science at the University of Strasbourg, told Times Higher Education that the coming spike in retirements would free up money for France’s increasingly empowered university presidents.

“Every new retirement is a new salary you can use for recruitment or to do something else, so the more retirement there is, the more freedom there is to make political choices,” he said. France’s public service law allows money saved from tenured salaries to be reallocated elsewhere, but it forbids the use of other funds to pay such staff.

France’s academic workforce has grown more experienced and expensive as it has aged, swelling payroll costs for universities, which took over responsibility for paying staff in 2007. A wave of retirements means that that bill can shrink if vacancies are filled by cheaper replacements, Dr Gossa added.

While strategic freedom may be welcomed by presidents, the financial breathing space to recruit in advance of retirement waves would also be useful, said Christine Musselin, an expert on French higher education and professor at the Sciences Po Centre for the Sociology of Organisations.

“We cannot manage recruitments and retirements. The up-and-down cycles have been there for many years, but for the moment there is no solution because they don’t provide the money to recruit in advance,” she said.

She said the roughly 1,000 openings annually for maîtres de conférences – an entry-level permanent role that combines teaching and research – was about half the number in 2005, despite student enrolments rising.

Universities will at least have many early career academics to choose from if they decide to spend freed-up money on replacing staff, Professor Musselin said; there were 100 candidates for a single position when she served on a hiring committee last year.

France’s non-selective universities, built around the principle of universal access and relatively uniform funding, have undergone a gradual transformation in recent years.

Excellence funding from competitive calls or money handed out for specific ministry targets such as reducing dropouts has opened up differences between universities, often favouring those in large cities, which have merged with the selective grandes écoles.

Dr Gossa said huge differences in the administrative and research staff whom institutions could call on affected their ability to absorb more students and retirements at the same time, and that such differences would be exaggerated if cash-strapped universities chose not to fill vacated tenure positions.

Universities’ responsibility for payroll budgets has led to a general decrease in the replacement of retiring staff as institutions seek to protect their meagre resources, said Romuald Bodin and Sophie Orange, sociologists at the University of Nantes specialising in higher education.

The resulting squeeze on staff was visible in class sizes, closed courses and early undergraduate teaching being done by postdoctoral or contracted staff, they said.

Hervé Christofol, an academic at the University of Angers and member of the national committee of the SNESUP-FSU trade union, said non-replacement of retirees would also likely lead to more hiring of precarious staff on hourly wages.

While many French academics may worry about what university presidents will do with the retirement windfall, Professor Musselin said steadily increasing student numbers and institutional research priorities would often favour rehiring and so limit presidents’ play.

Despite these factors favouring the status quo, she said, “rare” disciplines such as ancient languages, which can be overlooked by ministerial research strategies and students, could still be “in danger”.

“It will vary a lot from one discipline to another, the possibility to reallocate and the rationale for reallocating,” she said.

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com