Universities and grandes écoles
Having read a recent piece in the FT on the state of French universities, a friend has asked me to explain the French system of higher education on this blog.
Like any equivalent system, there are a host of exceptions, sub-clauses and subtleties, but I shall be brief. Basically, French universities are open to anyone who has passed their baccalauréat. That means roughly 82% of those who sit the exam have immediate access to higher education. The pass mark is an average, over all the papers, of 10 out of 20 (all French exams are marked out of 20). Having passed the baccalauréat, a student can enrol for any subject at university, entrance cannot be refused. That is considered a republican value.
The weeding-out process happens at the end of the first year: in some subjects, medicine for example, the first year exams are tough with a 90% failure rate. If you fail your first year exams you can try any other subject. I think you are allowed three goes before you have to pay your own way. Thus, in summary, going to university is seen as nothing greater than the natural extension of the lycée. A university degree carries scant kudos and for the majority of subjects does not guarantee you a job (far from it), it is merely another step on the long road.
Indeed universities themselves carry scant kudos. They are run (and poorly financed) by the state; the teaching staff are unsackable civil servants. Nevertheless there is a pecking order, and every year a list of the best universities is published in the French press. But since students fees are only paid if they go to their local university, it serves little practical purpose. And the list is only relative: as everyone knows, according to Shanghai’s Jiao Tong world rankings the best French university (Paris 11) rates only 64, with the next (Strasbourg) at number 96.
The new minister of higher education has just passed a series of reforms which will allow university directors more autonomy. In particular they will be able to look for money from elsewhere to establish research centres and they will have some say over the choice of staff. However, the biggest reform, making universities selective as they are in Britain, was rejected as unrepublican by the students’ union.
Anyway, back to the baccalauréat. Those with a simple pass can go straight to university, those with an average of 12 or more out of 20 will be tempted instead to go to a grande école. Grandes écoles are not the rarified things of public imagination: there are well over 100, most with several branches. As well as the well-known ones like Sciences Politiques and the Ecole polytechnique, there are equally important though lower-profile ones like the Ecoles des Mines or the Ecoles des Ponts et chaussées. The reason why French engineering is arguably the best in the world (anything from viaducts and nuclear reactors to TGV’s, Airbuses and Concordes) is because of the justifiable prestige of their engineering grandes écoles.
However, only 7% of those passing the baccalauréat will try to into a grande école. Apart from the better level of education, the distinguishing aspect of a grande école is that to get in you need to sit a competitive exam (it’s not the mark that’s important but where you finish). The level of the competitive exam is so different from anything they have learnt at school that most students need a one or two year’s preparation course. In the past this cost money and is why, in the past, the grandes écoles were places for the middle class. Now there’s a serious attempt to get people from less privileged backgrounds involved. It’s too early to say whether it’s working, but kids from the middle classes still have a huge advantage because an important component of many exams is general or cultural studies, which the middle classes tend to learn at their mother’s knee.
Once accepted by a grande ecole, many believe they are set up for life, and this is probably true. To get a good teaching post you need to have been through a grande école. But, to answer my friend’s supplementary question, those who graduate from grandes ecoles are not enarques.
Oh no. ENA, the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, calls itself the grande école des grandes écoles. It is a post-graduate school, and there is little point in applying unless you have either two (even three) university degrees or a degree from a grande école. Only a small percentage of ENA pupils come direct from a grande école, though: many apply after a few years’ work experience (though of course they are probably still grande école graduates). Again, to get in you have to sit a competitive exam. Even grande école graduates will usually spend a year doing the ENA preparation course. In simple terms, six out of seven will fail the written exam, and half of the remainder will fail the orals. There are three orals, the last of which, the Grand Orale, is particularly tough. 90 pupils are accepted each year. That is why enarques are an elite. How many thousand graduate from Oxbridge each year? Or from America’s Ivy League colleges? In France it’s just 90. (There are now courses for international students, and short courses for students from but I’m not going to go into those).
As the director of ENA, Antoine Durrleman, told me earlier this year, there are two supremely difficult moments for the ENA student: getting in and getting out. The graduation exam is equally difficult and has the particularity of classifying the graduates in order. Their final position will determine which job they go to (they have little choice in the matter): no.1 gets the best job, in the prime minister’s office, no.2 goes to the ministry of the interior and so on. But while any enarque is seen by the rest of us as somehow superior (a feeling shared and encouraged by many enarques themselves) it’s actually only the top ten or so who really matter: they go into one of the Grands Corps, usually the Cour des Comptes, the Conseil d’Etat or the Inspection générale des Finances. I’m not going to write more about the ENA here, a subject of endless fascination, but one of the many paradoxes in deeply indebted France is that the absolute crème de la crème are the Inspecteurs de Finance.
August 2nd, 2007 at 8:30 pm
A comment on the Jiao Tong world rankings. Their scoring system is oriented towards science and technology and to research published in english, so the journals Nature and Science are key in their eyes (see http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2006/ARWU2006Methodology.htm). As TK points out, French engineering (and other science-based fields like pharma) is undoubtedly first rank. Presumably the grande écoles provide the leadership for the cadres in these fields of endeavour in France while the universities provide the rank and file. In the UK now many of the best S&T graduates seem to be creamed off by the financial institutions in the City where their quantitative skills are applied to the construction of derivatives etc. rather than TGVs. How sustainable this will be is a moot point.
August 12th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
This is an excellent account of the arcanes & curiosities of French superior education. But there is something missing to your account. Besides the Grandes Ecoles and the universities is another layer of superior education in France: the so-called “classes préparatoires aux grandes écoles”, which belong to the Lycées and not the universities. These constitute a two or three year cycle of studies, where the “best” students from the lycées, prepare the entrance exams to Polytechnics, Normale Sup, HEC, etc. This system (”khagne”, “taupe”, in the local slang) has existed since Napoleon. Not every lycée has its “preparatory classes”, only those in the center of the main French towns (hence where only the upper classes can afford to live and send their children to such lycées). There is no entrance examination to such classes, but only a selection ( most of the time done by the headmaster (proviseur) of the lycée on the basis of the student’s grades at baccalaureat and of the last year of lycée. The teachers in these prep classes are well paid ( often better paid than academics in universities), and aware of their role in the selection of elites, because they know that they hold the key to enter the kingdom of Grandes Ecoles. But there is no need of a university academic degree other than the “agregation” ( no need of a university thesis) to teach in these classes. The teachers are selected by the Inspectors of Education Nationale and by no universiyt committee. This closed system has no connections with the university and it helps perpetuate what Pierre Bourdieu has described as a “noblesse d’Etat”. When there are voiced asking for a reform of this system, which is utterly elitist, the powerful association of classes prépratoires threatens to go on strike. The argument the most often heard when one criticizes this system and when it is suggested that the clesses préparatoires should be mergend into the universities is: “Yes we know it is elitist, but why destroy what works well? ”
The results of this dual system of superior education are well documented : the proportion of children from the lower classes in superior education is well documented . See the eloquent following statistics
Part des étudiants des grandes écoles d’origine populaire ( en % )
( origine populaire = paysans, ouvriers, employés, artisans et commerçants )
1951-1955 1973-1977 1989-1993
Ecole polytechnique 21,0 14,8 7,8
Ecole nationale d’Administration 18,3 15,6 6,1
Ecole Normale supérieure 23,9 17,2 6,1
HEC 38,2 31,5 11,8
total des étudiants 29,0 21,2 8,6
ensemble des 20-24 ans 90,8 84, 6 68,2
( Source : M.Euriat et C.Thélot, Education et formations, juin 1995 )
see also :
http://www.apmep-aix-mrs.org/maths/load/ineg_soc_GE.pdf
I would be interested to know about how the UK fares on the same period with respect to access of popular classes to superior education and to the places which, mutatis mutandis, are where the British elite is formed ( Oxford, Cambridge, LSE etc.)
August 12th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
sorry the chart has been scrambled
please look at the link above or at p. 8 of this document :
http://www.ihes.fr/~lafforgue/textes/SavoirsFondamentaux.pdf
August 13th, 2007 at 6:11 am
Welcome back to the blog, M. Scalpel. Your piece on the classes preparatoire is spot-on (I felt I didn’t have the space to cover it, though my niece did the prepa for Sciences Po at a Marseille university and has interesting comments). I can’t answer your question about UK universities, and am currently ploughed under a piece about Sarkozy’s first 100 days, but have put your question to some much better informed friends who may answer in the next few days
August 20th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Roughly a tenth of Oxbridge students come from the social classes that cover manual workers and the unemployed. But the sifting starts much earlier. Three-quarters of British 16 year-olds with parents in professional occupations are studying for A levels or the equivalent; under a third of students with parents in routine occupations are doing so. And roughly half the top A level grades in the subjects that count - maths, modern languages, physics and so on - come from private schools. The top rungs of our elite are more accessible than those in France, but we still deprive far too many clever children from poor homes of the chance to get the best tertiary education.
August 23rd, 2007 at 3:05 pm
Dear Mrs Cairncross
Many thanks for this very interesting information.
In a sense the rate of children from the working classes is similar in both countries, and I’m afraid the proportion might be similar elsewhere in Europe and in the US. But what I find particularly hypocrital in France is the official claim that “university” education is open to everyone, which is true, while at the same time everyone know that there is a rival system, that of Grandes Ecoles, which is NOT open to everyone, and to which less and less children from the working classes have access.
Some people propose reverse discrimination through bringing children from suburbs to prestigious center-of-town lycées or even schools ( as recently with Science Po in Paris). But apart from the debate about reverse discrimination ( Mr Sarkozy is for it, another example of his simple mindedness), one can wonder how such measures can be efficacious. They concern only a very small number of children. A much better politics who be to keep the “democratic” recruitment of universities, but with entrance exams of reasonable difficulty. This would be the end of “baccalaureat”, but who cares : everyone knows it is worth almost nothing in most cases. And most of all, as soon as there is selection in universities, the attractiveness of Grandes Ecoles, which do select at their entrance, would fall down.