On Monday, Campus France (which is roughly equivalent to Canada’s CBIE, if CBIE were an arms-length government agency) published its new Stratégie d’attractivité pour les étudiants internationaux.  It’s an intriguing document for a couple ofreasons so I thought I would talk a bit about it today.

It starts off run-of-the-mill, with some gee-whiz stats about the growth of the international student market.  Then, on page 6, we get to the heart of the matter.  The page is titled “La France, 4^ieme pays d’accueil, court néanmoins une risqué de décrochage”.   (Not literal) translation: “we’re pretty good at attracting international students, but others are catching up.  We gotta do something!”

Now, it is not entirely clear at this point in the document why France has to do something.  No evidence is provided that international students are a benefit (in fact, since they pay no fees and take up space in an underfunded system which is bursting at the seams, one may might well suggest the opposite).  The closest we come to an actual rationale is in the introduction, where Emmanuel Macron’s ghostwriter basically says “because French.”  In other words, international students are seen as such an obvious soft power good that it’s not even necessary to explain why a country needs them.  Which I think is kind of interesting.

The document then goes on to look at France’s weaknesses in attracting international students, a step which is too frequently missed in these strategy documents.  Basically it comes down to: visa administration is a hassle, post-study work visas are difficult to get, the cost of living is high, and structured welcome/integration programs are missing.  And then – again, uncommon in international strategy documents – most of the rest of the strategy is based around removing these barriers.  I know this sounds elementary, but trust me, this is rare in international student strategy documents, which are usually just laundry lists of initiatives linked to some kind of target for student numbers (incidentally, the target is 500,000 per year in this document).

Now I say “most of the rest of the strategy” because there are a couple of humdinger policy initiatives in here which are, let’s say, not easily explicable.  The first is “doubler le nombre d’éudiants bénéficiant d’un programme taught in English” and no, that’s not me having a seizure halfway through a sentence, that’s the actual title of the initiative. France’s government want to double the number of students studying in English. If having international students for the sake of having international students was the point of all this, sure – English is the international lingua franca and it’s a lot easier to attract students if you’re teaching in that language.  But since the whole point of the strategy is “because French”, you must look at this and ask yourself “hein”?

The other big policy initiative is the proposed introduction of fees for international students at French universities – €2770 for a bachelor’s degree and €3770 for graduate degrees.  They’re also tripling the number of scholarships, which I suppose is meant to address the cost of living thing.  But it’s weird to make “cost” an issue and then say you’re going to increase fees.  Not that it’s a bad policy, of course: higher education in France costs about €10,000 per student and asking the world’s most-highly-taxed citizenry to shoulder the burden of another 250,000 students with zero contribution might reasonably be thought of as a but much, particularly when many universities are already bursting at the seams (it’s not clear from the document whether the money will go to the government or to the receiving institution – the latter would make more sense in terms of aligning incentives where spaces are in higher demand).  But there’s no doubt the framing is odd.

We can expect this last policy to cause a great deal of uproar and even student mobilization.  It’s not that the French don’t accept the principle of paying for higher education: les Grades Écoles and the various private Catholic universities, which together probably educate about a quarter of all students, all charge fees.  But fees in “universities” – that is, the mainly lower-status generalist institutions – are still widely seen as verboten (apart from some mainly nominal inscription fees of about €200/year), and a move to charge international students will likely be seen as a stalking horse for higher fees for all students.  Whether that’s true or not, I have no idea (I suspect it’s not, but what do I know?), but it’s 100% certain that the French left will oppose it, presumably accompanied by liberal use of the terms “Anglo-Saxon”, “néoliberal” and reminders that Macron once worked in the Finance industry.

In short, this document is going to get a lot more attention than your average international recruitment strategy.

Bon weekend.