Positional Competition in Higher Education

Within the perimeter of French higher education, the elite business schools have four distinctive characteristics : they are free to select their students ; they price the tuition fees at an unusually high rate ; they manage their faculty outside the rules of the civil service status ; they depend only marginally on public funding. Within the oligopoly they form, they compete in a positional arms race. The leading schools innovate in their education and research technology and their innovations trickle down the hierarchy. Rankings show less variability than inertia. The paper offers an explanation, along the lines of the theoretical model that views higher education as a customer-input technology.Classification JEL : I23, M52, L13