French Degree System Research

The first degree in the world was born at the Universitéde Paris in the Middle Ages, its degree system was gradually established along with the development of the university's four colleges - Art College, Medical College, College of Law, and Divinity College ~ and then became the most comprehensive degree system in the Middle Ages. After the development of nearly a thousand years, France's degree system has become increasingly mature, making France one of the countries with advanced higher education level in the world. Compared to France's degree system, our country's degree system was established relatively late and there exists problems such as too much centralized power of awarding degrees, imbalance of degree structure, absence of examination mechanism for degree awarding power and lack of social participation in the degree quality assurance system etc, which has seriously influenced the proceedings of reform of higher education in our country.The importance of degree system in higher education system, the drawbacks of our country's degree system, and the intensive research of France's degree system inspired the author to look into the reform of higher education in our country. The basis of this thesis is: in a time of internationalization of higher education, how should we learn from the experiences of foreign countries, especially search for the opinions and basis from foreign degree system to establish a degree system with Chinese characteristics that suits the needs of modern development. The thesis adopted the measure of historical research to trace the history of establishment and development of France's degree system, and then further analyzed the characteristics of France's degree system from the aspects of education studies, philosophy, religion, sociology, and history, and intensively studied the effects and success and failure of degree system in France's higher education. The thesis also used the comparative research to compare the degree system of France with that of UK and USA to search for more comprehensive references for the reform of degree system of our country. Following this way of thinking, the thesis begun with the birth of European universities in the Middle Ages, by looking into the Chivalry System and the Guild System, it intensively studied the first Bachelor's Degree and Ph.D. in the world which came into being accompanying with the birth of the "Mother of European Universities" in the Middle Ages - Universitéde Paris and the comprehensive degree system of the Medieval Europe that ensued thereafter, and it also analyzed the France's degree system that has gradually become mature during nearly one thousand years' development and demonstrated the characteristics of France's degree system such as religious nature, centralism, and diversity, and indicated that so far there has been a multi-tier and multi-grade degree & diploma system and a degree awarding examination and degree quality control mechanism with great flexibility in the modem degree system of France, which has cultivated various kinds of talents for society and contributed a lot to ensuring the world-leading role of France's higher education. Secondly, through the comparative research of the degree systems of France, UK, and USA, in the process of analyzing the merits and drawbacks of the three typical degree systems in the world's higher education, the thesis came to the conclusion that: the evolution of the degree system of France which has similar education system as our country should be counted as better inspiration and reference for the reform of degree system of our country. Lastly, the thesis pointed out the inspiration of the unique degree system of France for the reform of our country's degree system: diversity of degree levels, concurrency of academic nature and specialty of degrees, and assurance of the quality of degrees. The thesis indicated that the internationalization of degree and degree system is an inevitable trend accompanying with the internationalization of higher education. Under such circumstances, the imperative pathway for the reform and development of our country's higher education is to constantly improve our country's degree system by taking into account our country's actual conditions and learning from advanced foreign experiences in a scientific and reasonable way.