Arab Educational Information Network

Observation of the performance of higher education in Algeria reveals a preoccupation with quantity, as is evident in the annual or periodic statistics compiled by the ministry, or university records of accomplishments, which emphasize advances in facilities and infrastructure needed to accommodate students. The problem of balancing quantity and quality was not acute in the sixties and seventies, when Algerian university graduates proved themselves in both the labor market and in further studies pursued at foreign universities. With reforms of higher education in the early eighties, involving programs and evaluation, and in the late nineties, involving restructuring, as well as with the continuing increase in the number of students, the balance between quantity and quality began to waver; levels of student achievement started to decline, and the gap between training and market requirements progressively widened. To accommodate the influx of large numbers into universities each year and improve outcomes, higher education officials began considering new reforms based on the Bachelor / Master / Doctorate system.This paper will address the following questions: What are the intellectual and objective bases of this system? What are the solutions it offers to the problem of balancing quantity with quality? What are the reactions of faculty and students to such systems and what are the obstacles faced during its implementation?