Financement des universités, financement des études

Regardless of the issue of tuition fees, we explore new ways to improve the financing of higher education in France. We first study funding formula from the state to universities. The so called ?San Remo? funding formula is modelled and its incentive properties are studied. Even if it is very powerful to contain costs, it presents the major drawback to push universities to increase the number of degrees. We suggest new funding formulae for teaching activities which introduce a yardstick competition between universities relative to their performance of their graduates on the job market. An implementation is proposed through a small change of the income tax return. In a second step, we argue in favour of the introduction of income contingent student loans. The student only repays through an extra income tax liability when his income exceeds some threshold. We propose a variant with automatic rescheduling. These two reforms are viewed as quite complement.