2 ways of looking at France
Two fascinating publications appeared this morning. The first, from theEcole des Mines, is a new classification of the world’s best places of higher education. Until now the reference has been the well-known Academic Ranking of World Universities, compiled by Shanghai University, based on how many past alumni have won major research prizes or made a splash in major scientific research journals. France does badly in this assessment partly (it is said) because most learned journals are in English, partly (more realistically) because in France even the prestigious grandes écoles do not rate research very highly. Their aim is to find the best and create from them the elite which will run France.
Given their poor rating in the Shanghai Ranking, it is not surprising that a French grande école decided to produce its own world classification. The Ecole des Mines considers that rather than research, it would be better to take the world’s top 500 companies, see where their current CEO’s received their higher education and then classify those places accordingly. The establishment which has produced the most CEO’s being considered the best. Using this criterion, Harvard comes out top, but more pertinent, France produces no less than five educational establishments in the top ten, America four, Japan one. Oxford (the whole university) is rated number eleven, equal with Yale and Keio.
For many who imagine that France wallows in airy-fairy theoreticians and is bad at beastly capitalist business this may come as a surprise. It is impressive that French post-graduate schools turn out so many top company directors, but a quick scroll down the list of the top 500 companies does not seem to produce that many French companies, and I didn’t notice enough mentions of the grandes écoles to be able to say that the Polytechnique, HEC, Sciences Po, ENA and the Ecole des Mines should occupy five out of the first ten places, so I am somewhat baffled as to how the ranking was arrived at – although I am sure that’s my lack and nothing to do with the Ecoles des Mines’ déontologie.
Another critique of the classification can be read at Telos.
The gulf between pure research (the Shanghai Ranking) and hard-nosed business is a timely subject, with the announcement of the Nobel prize for physics being awarded to Frenchman Albert Fert. M. Fert’s prize-winning research was in giant magnetoresistance – one of whose practical applications is in the hard-drive of every laptop, thus an example of research being used in highly competitive business. But although the research was done partly in France, the business-end came from IBM in the USA. As Arthur Goldhammer points out, France is very much at the cutting edge of physics, but it sadly lacks the links between the laboratory and the board room. French universities and grandes écoles consider education should be pure, unsullied by business interests or support – to their country’s detriment. So what are all these brilliant French CEO’s glittering at the top of the Ecole des Mines’ ranking doing?
Not enough for the country, would seem to be a conclusion of today’s other interesting publication, “La Société de Défiance », produced by the Centre pour la recherche économique et ses applications. Basically the authors of this paper find that the famous modèle français has made the French an intensely distrustful people: “of neighbours, trades unions, the public administration and the market. This distrust goes together with a more frequent [than in other countries] lack of good citizenship (incivisme) in the essential domains of the running the economy and the welfare state.” In their introduction the authors say that “a mix of corporatism and étatism du modèle français brings about this distrust and lack of loyalty,” and that both the latter undermine the efficiency and the equity of the economy and thus in turn foster more étatism and corporatism. The paper is long, I shall read it in full and write about it later in the week.