French universities: Elite syncopations

Date: 29/11/03

Troubles as universities such as Sciences-Po seek to modernise

IT MUST send a frisson down the spine of any politician who remembers '68. A strike by students has spread to 18 universities. From Rennes to Lyons, students have occupied campuses, blocked lecture halls and staged protests. A panicking government has retreated, reinstated, and then backed down again on part of its plans.

The students' gripe? Neither fees (nominal) nor selection (anyone with a baccalaureat is admitted). Rather, they are cross about plans for more autonomy, plus a new diploma system - a three-year undergraduate degree, followed by a two-year masters - officially meant to align France with the rest of Europe, but actually modelled on America. Such changes, the students say, are a humiliating assault on French diplomas, and a step to commercialisation, if not privatisation.

The new degrees, says Luc Ferry, the education minister, are essential to “fight competition from American universities.” But the reality is that France's higher-education system reserves real competition for an elite of grandes ecoles, which train very few of France's 2.1m students. Overcrowded, non-selective universities for the rest cannot hope to keep up.

Not that all grandes ecoles are modernising. Contrast the Paris Institute of Political Studies (“Sciences-Po”) with the National School for Administration (ENA), the postgraduate civil-service academy. Sciences-Po's foreign students, especially Americans, used to be glorified tourists: in town for a left-bank experience, not a diploma. Today, a third of its students are foreign, and three-quarters do a degree. The school already teaches a three-year undergraduate degree, followed by “un masters”, which attracts Americans. All undergraduates spend a year abroad, and learn two foreign languages; a third of classes are not taught in French. The school even has an affirmative-action programme that has just been ruled unlawful by a Paris court. Inevitably fees have risen.

“It was a question of life or death,” says Richard Descoings, the young head of Sciences-Po, who masterminded the overhaul. The school was known mainly as an ante-chamber for ENA. It still supplies 90% of the 60-odd students who go there after a first degree each year. Its alumni list, like ENA's, is a political “Who's Who”: Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, Laurent Fabius, Jack Lang, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. But Mr Descoings is now rebranding Sciences-Po as a competitor to America's Ivy League universities or the London School of Economics, with courses ranging from international relations to marketing and (this is France) “management of cultural enterprises”. It is planning a journalism school, and offers an MBA.

No such changes are in prospect at ENA, which has trained two of the past three French presidents and seven of the past 12 prime ministers. It was set up by Charles de Gaulle in 1945 to mould the elite, at a time when administration and industry were tightly linked. Today, an ENA graduate's address book still supplies top connections. But the calculation for would-be students has changed. Privatisation and new rules limiting pantouflage (shuffling between the civil service and public enterprises) have narrowed options. The prestige of a top American MBA and the strength of such home-grown business grandes ecoles as HEC or ESSEC have opened up other routes to top jobs.

ENA faces changes of its own. Teaching will in future be solely in Strasbourg (it is now shared with Paris); and the entrance exam is to be opened to other European Union candidates. Yet the school sticks unapologetically to training for public service, with compulsory internships at a local prefecture and courses on French administrative law and budgetary policy. Even foreign students are civil servants.

Not everybody approves of the Sciences-Po example. In a country that jealously guards the idea of higher education for all, elitism has an awkward place. As he backtracked on his planned reforms, Mr Ferry insisted that “the Sciences-Po model is not the model that should prevail for universities”. Competitive excellence, it seems, is fine - but only for the elite.

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