FRANCE NOW:The debate on third level education hits some of modern France's most sensitive nerves, writes Ruadhán Mac Cormaic in Cergy
ESSEC LOOKS the part. The main building on its gleaming campus in the Paris suburb of Cergy has the calm, well-ordered feel of a corporate head office.
The library is spartan and bright, the attractive cafe filled with multinational students, and the glass footbridges that link each building give a fine view over the sports grounds outside.
Over coffee between classes, Anwesha Ghosh, a confident 25-year-old from Mumbai, explains that she chose to study business here because of the college’s good reputation and the doors it would open for her in Europe.
She wasn’t disappointed: through it she found an apprenticeship in a Paris company, and she plans to stay on in Europe for at least a few years after graduating. “My experience here has been very positive,” she says.
To some, this is the apex of French higher education; an intellectually demanding, diverse and wealthy institution that attracts strong students from around the world. To others, by the very fact of that success, it’s a stark reminder of what is wrong with France’s third-level system.
Essec, one of the most prestigious business schools in France, is a grande école, meaning that it can select its students through a competitive entrance exam and set its own tuition fees, currently about €10,000 a year. Although there are more than 200 grandes écoles, a handful of famous institutions at the top of the pyramid are de facto feeder schools for the country’s political, bureaucratic and business elite.
The great majority of French students attend universities, which are open to anyone who has the baccalauréat (equivalent to the Leaving Cert) and charge only nominal fees. The best universities are recognised for their excellence and are in heavy demand, but the sector in general is underfunded, functioning beyond capacity and beset by high drop-out rates.
France’s debate over third-level goes to the heart of some of its most fraught self-examination, whether it’s over the ruling elite, the equality principle or the country’s place in the world.
Critics portray the grandes écoles as inegalitarian incubators for the self-perpetuation of the white, middle class elite that has ruled France for decades. Their defenders believe they offer a model that should be copied, not repudiated.
“A grande école is just an elite university,” says Pierre Tapie, Essec’s director general and president of the conference of grandes écoles.
What is unusual about France, he says, is not that it has elite institutions but that universities take in students who are not suited to their courses, and then charge them no fees.
With France’s spending on third level under huge pressure – it spends less per student than the OECD average – the conference of university presidents recently broke a taboo by suggesting that fees would have to be increased and family incomes taken into account.
“It’s very difficult to change, because there are 1.5 million people in university – that’s five per cent of the electoral roll,” says Tapie. “All politicians are prisoners of this.”
Less than a five-minute walk from Essec stands the University of Cergy-Pontoise, built on a large campus catering to more than 11,000 students.
Cergy-Pontoise has a strong reputation, but its drop-out rates in some courses are up to 60 per cent and it plainly doesn’t have the resources it needs.
However, university president Françoise Moulin Civil remains a firm advocate of the principle that universities should be open to every student. “Personally, I’m quite proud that our higher education system is open to all the country’s young people,” she says.
“I’m strongly attached to the idea of a university system that is open to the greatest number of people, whether rich or poor.”
Significant changes have been made to the third-level system in recent years.
In one of the major reforms of his term, President Nicolas Sarkozy signed a law in 2007 that gave universities autonomy to decide how their budgets were spent – a small revolution in a system that had previously been micro-managed by central government.
Efforts have been made to bridge the gap between universities and grandes écoles through joint degrees and co-operation in research, while universities have introduced certain selective courses – mainly at masters level – modelled on the grande école method.
Individual institutions have been taking their own initiatives to stem the drop-out rates.
At Cergy-Pontoise, Moulin Civil says all new students now attend an integration week and are offered personal tutoring – efforts that are beginning to have an effect.
But it’s the vexed questions of access and diversity, tightly bound up as they are with France’s wider social debates, that remain the most sensitive.
One person who knows the system well is 24-year-old Essec student Alexis Bonal, the son of a customs official and a teacher from Corsica. After school he spent two years in a classe prépa – an intensive course that prepares students for grande école entrance exams – before securing a place at Insa, an elite engineering school in Lyon. Hoping for a career in industry, he came to Essec to widen his skills and gain a business qualification.
“I think the social mix is a real question,” Bonal says. “I think scientific courses tend to have more diversity, and you get more of a mix outside Paris. I had the impression in engineering school that I was meeting more children of working class families.”
A major problem, he feels, is that the classe prépa – source of one third of grande école students – has come to be seen as a high-pressured, intolerably gruelling experience. “The more we put out this myth that the classe prépa is extremely difficult and hellish, the more we discourage people from less privileged backgrounds. “They might not have parents who can tell them, ‘no, it’s not true, I did a classe prépa myself, and you’ll be fine’.”
To widen access, Essec offers generous scholarships – about 50 per cent of its students are given some form of financial aid, with average support coming to 30 per cent of a student’s fees. But Pierre Tapie is adamant that quotas would be counter- productive. “If we create privileged routes through social quotas, then ultimately employers will say, ‘are you from the quota stream or the normal stream?’ It’s the opposite of social promotion.”
The most pressing question for the sector, Tapie argues, is how French higher level education – and by extension France itself – can remain competitive and innovative if it continues to invest so little in the sector. On this, Moulin-Civil agrees. Universities receive 80-90 per cent of their funding from the state, leaving them acutely vulnerable.
“The ultimate question is, what share of public money do we devote to today’s comforts compared to investing in the jobs and the competitiveness of France for tomorrow,” says Tapie. “That’s the big question.”
IRISH VOICES ENJOYING STRASBOURG, THE BORDER CITY
Emma Gormley, from Clontarf in Dublin, lives in Strasbourg. She works as an assistant editor at the Council of Europe and a freelance translator.
“I did an Erasmus year at the University of Strasbourg, then came back after my European Studies degree for a masters in translation in a private school here.
“They were such different experiences. At university, I felt completely lost. We couldn’t find anyone to help us, and the year I was there, there were strikes on and we missed out on two months of classes.
“The masters was a completely different experience – the school was tiny, there was a lot of interaction between teachers and students. They knew our names, for a start.
“I spent a year as an English-language assistant at university in Lille, and I remember giving tests where two or three of the students got all the answers correct. So I obviously gave them 20 out of 20. They were absolutely shocked – they couldn’t believe they’d got such high marks. I overheard teachers in the staffroom saying that if someone gets all the answers correct, they can’t give 20 so they take marks off if the writing is not that neat or they’ve used Tipp-Ex on the page. It was so discouraging.
“Years ago I used to idolise the French. I thought we should do things like the French do. Living here, I see different sides to it, obviously, and as I get older I’d hate to think that I’d never live in Ireland again.
“But I love Strasbourg, because I know it so well and it’s a beautiful city. I love the fact that I’ve met people from all over the world here – I’ve friends from Africa and South America. I live two minutes from the city centre, I can cycle to Germany, I can go to Paris or Brussels for the weekend. Life is quite cheap as well. I’m very happy here for the moment.”
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