Stormy weather on higher education: Globalization and change

Abstract

The paper tackles the issue of the changes in universities, induced by the internationalization of higher education at the turn of the Millennium and the ensuing national reforms that have spread all over the world. Using a meso-approach of the organization, governance and performance of universities, it suggests a typology based on the tensions they experiment between two regimes of worth - the traditional one that favors "reputation" as a social evaluation vs the new one, build around a metrics-based "excellence" assessment. It finally questions the most sensitive issues and challenges they face and how they behave depending on their strategic capacity to face their resources and constraints.