If you study global higher education, one of the hardest habits to shake is that of assuming isomorphism. That building over there is a university? With departments and faculties? I went to a university with departments and faculties. I therefore know exactly what s going on in there.

Except that is not really true, Universities in different countries often behave in quite different ways. There are, sometimes, serious outliers. And no country’s system is more of an outlier than that of France.

France have, universities, of course, but until very recently they were essentially arms of the state. The idea of universities as independent social and economic actors is still very new. Even more strikingly, France is one of the few places in the world where universities are not at the apex of the Higher Education. That honour instead is reserved for what are known as “Les Grandes Écoles”, a set of institutions so separate and elite that thy have their own exclusive student intake system that takes two full years to complete.

Today my guest is Andrée Sursock, a higher education consultant and Senior Advisor to the European Universities Association. She’s here to take us on a guided tour of the French system and its history and also to describe the rapid pace of reforms that have taken place over the last two decades, in particular through the presidencies of Nicolas Sarkozy and Emmanuel Macron. 

The pace of change is very fast in France these days – maybe faster than anyone else in Europe. And that makes for a very lively episode of The World of Higher Education Podcast.

But enough from me, let’s listen to Andrée.

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The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 2.18 | Higher Education in France

Transcript

Alex Usher (AU): Andrée, I want to give people a bit of historical perspective on French universities. Obviously higher education in France has a long history, going back eight or nine centuries. I’m not sure when the Université de Paris was founded. But in another sense, France has really only had modern universities, that is institutions which have control over their own direction, since about 1968 and the introduction of what’s known as the Loi Faure. What changed in 1968 exactly? What did universities look like before and after that year?

Andrée Sursock (AS): The history of French University has been a long one and the contrasting one, I would say. What the Loi Faure did was to respond to the protest of May ‘68 by giving more power to the university at the expense of the independent faculties, the faculties in the sense of colleges and schools. Their legal status was done away with, and the idea was to break the disciplinary silos and to have multidisciplinary institutions. The law did several other things, like for instance, change the status of academic staff to integrate research and teaching in their title. So, they are called now researchers-teachers, and they are very fond of the title. They don’t want to be called teachers. The law also introduced elected representation on the boards and a few external members as well. So, the difference, if you go back centuries, the first universities were founded in the 13th century. They were really institutions that had a range of responsibilities and power. The revolution closed the universities, and when Napoleon came on board and reopened, what he reopened were 33 faculties across the country. So, this was the Napoleonic University. It went then through several phases where they were closed and reopened again. At any rate, the most important point about the Loi Fraure is that it allowed the university to be recreated as institutions.

AU: It seems to me that it took universities two or three decades to come to terms with their new form and with the powers that they had. As you say, they were recreating universities out of a set of independent faculties that were national and they were creating universities that were local. So, although they had formally the power to act as independent strategic entities. It seems like it took them a couple of decades to start acting as though they really were. Now, is that just the generational change needed to occur, or were there other forces at work, new additional laws which spurred these changes?

AS: Yes, I think it’s good to remember that the autonomy of French universities was and still is very constrained. The state released its grip on the institutions very progressively and slowly. To give you a sense of this progression, in 2007, there was a new law that was passed which was really a very important law of autonomy for the universities. The universities were granted more autonomy to manage their budget and even their buildings if they wanted. Nevertheless, the universities were still under the control of the state and had to seek ex-ante accreditation for their new study programs and their new research. In 2013, a new law came in and abolished this ex-ante accreditation. But, if you look at the scorecard on autonomy that is established by the European University Association, France is really behind many of its peer institutions elsewhere in Europe. Their governance arrangement is defined by law. The management of their staff is difficult because they are mostly civil servants. The research activities are partly dependent on very powerful research, national research organizations. The external quality assurance is very heavy. So, their room for maneuver is very small.

AU: Our listeners will remember that Enora Pruvot came on our show, last April of 2023, to talk about that scorecard. I’ll come back to universities in a second, but I first want to talk about the one really unique feature of French higher education, which is that it’s really the only system in the world where universities are not really considered the pinnacle of the system. That honour goes instead to the grandes écoles. What can you tell us about the institutions in the system? Why are they considered to be at the top of the pyramid?

AS: The grandes écoles were initially created in the 18th century to provide the French state with senior officers in the public administration, the military, and also technical expertise, engineering. École Polytechnique and the École Normale were first founded, and then they were followed by a multitude of grandes écoles. Today, I think there are about 250 grandes écoles, but I was just reading a publication today that mentioned 400, so who knows. There is a hierarchy within those grandes écoles, but the reason that they are at the apex of the system is that because they are very competitive. Entering a grandes écoles is a very competitive process. Once in a grandes écoles, the students are in a more sheltered environment with a better student to teacher ratio. Once they graduate, they benefit from a very strong alumni network that ensures their entrance into the elite in the public and the private sector. So, this is why they are so valued. By contrast, the universities must accept any holder of a baccalaureate, and they are much less well funded than the grandes écoles. So, the cost per student is much less than it than in the grandes écoles. So, they have to deal with a population that’s weaker with their hands tied behind their back, basically.

AU: One of the ways that grandes écoles get better students is that there’s a whole stream which is devoted to getting a post-secondary, but not certificate-oriented, if I can put it that way or basically a diploma-oriented education which acts as a funnel towards them, right? These are what they call it, le classe préparatoire, and that takes a couple of years of additional study after the final year of secondary school to get in. What are these classe préparatoire? How do they work across the country? Or are there certain schools that are top like, Andover in the United States that are the place to go if you want to get into INA or the polytechnic?

AS: The classe preparatoire last for two years. They are generally offered in the secondary high schools. They are very much organized continuation of secondary education in that the students are there all day and they go from class to class and so on. There is a hierarchy amongst them, and the best are in Paris. So, it’s a very competitive to get into those. They prepare students for the entrance exam to the grandes écoles.

AU: Does each grandes écoles have its own exam?

AS: They come together. The engineering schools, some of them will have a common exam. But depending on how well you do in this competitive exam, you will go to the most prestigious or less prestigious grandes écoles So, the whole system is geared toward producing the elite.

AU: So, there is an issue of stratification there. I imagine it causes quite a lot of debate in France. The idea that the grandes écoles is very much like the Ivy League in the United States. They end up with a student body, which is drawn disproportionately from the upper echelons of society and some, I’ve looked at Sciences Po, they’ve gone quite some distance to attract minority students from underprivileged areas. But what’s the real story? Does this sector generate or mitigate inequality?

AS: No, the sector really reproduces inequality. It starts with the classe preparatoire and the sociological makeup of their students. They come from the most privileged background as compared to the university students that are much more diverse in background. Sciences Po in 2001 opened the way to reaching out to marginalized groups. Since then I would say, most grandes écoles have an outreach program. The issue is that it comes a bit too late in the process, in the pipeline. There is a need to have an intervention at the level of the secondary school to provide students from marginalized background with the proper information because their parents do not have that information about what’s out there in terms of options. Also to support them in in building their self confidence that they can access those schools. It’s a lot of work to do that. Sciences Po works with the lycées but with just a small number of lycées. That it’s a huge problem. French political culture puts a great emphasis on equality and equity, but they also favor as individual strategies selection and elitism, in fact. So, there is a tension between those two.

AU: That is an interesting paradox.

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AU: Andrée, let’s get back to universities. It seems to me that one of the major thrusts of French higher education policy of the last couple of decades has been to encourage institutions both to compete and to collaborate. Let’s start with the latter. How would you describe the various policies in encouraging regional collaboration between universities that have been put in place by successive governments? I’m thinking, in particular, those policies that have encouraged institutional mergers in places like Strasbourg and Paris-Saclay. Why has the government been interested in this regional policy and are there any particular initiatives that have been effective in reaching those goals?

AS: The first thing to keep in mind is that the regional cooperation started with university presidents, some university presidents. The ministry only joined the movement and continued to support it. The first consortium was actually established in Grenoble where there were three universities on one campus, and they started working together under an umbrella organization. Others followed suit. The ministry joined because at the same time, there was a movement to decentralize in France, and the regional authorities were getting more power and more responsibilities and bigger budgets, and some of them started financing higher education. At any rate, the idea was to produce mini–Silicon Valleys, where you would have a neighboring institutions, universities, and grandes ecoles working together and working with the socioeconomic partners for regional development. So, this was the idea. The consortium basically managed common doctoral schools, common research infrastructure, sometimes common international strategies, or knowledge transfer strategies. At any rate, I think that the cooperation in the French education system is a very highly valued attitude. There is more cooperation than competition.

AU: Back in 2003, 20 years ago now, when the Shanghai rankings first appeared, France experienced something called the Le Choc du Shanghai which I interpret as a kind of general incredulity about how French higher education institutions appeared in international comparison. I always found this a bit odd because universities weren’t necessarily set up, I know you said that the professors were proud to be researcher teachers, but so much of French scientific production is outside universities in places like the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. So why was the reaction so negative? Why was it so vivid? How did it drive policy so much?

AS: It’s interesting that you have this perception of the system because in fact the research is happening in the universities. So, if we take the example, of the largest of the research national research organizations, which is the CNRS, Centre National de la Research Scientific, it does absolutely outstanding research. It had a budget in 2021 of 3.7 billion U.S. dollars. Over 1000 research labs across France. Ninety-seven percent of those research labs were shared with universities or grandes écoles and 27 percent of the researchers in those labs were from the CNRS. The rest came from the universities or the grandes écoles. So, the issue really had to do with how the researchers were signing their academic publication. There was a university in Lyon that tried to count in how many ways the researchers were signing and discovered that there was over 50 different ways that the researchers were signing from their own university. So, you can understand that now the lack of visibility from the Shanghai point of view, but great efforts have been expanded to make sure that now people sign with their university affiliation first. This has been a constant policy now for 10 years or more and it’s working.

AU: Soon after the shock though, the French government created an academic excellence initiative to help close the gap and to create a French superstar universities. I know that’s a process you were part of, and you wrote a chapter about it in in the book, Academic Star Wars. We had Phil Altbach on the show a few weeks ago talking about that book. How was the program structured and to what extent did it achieve its goals?

AS: The objective of the program was to help ensure the emergence of 5 to 10 university that would be at the top of the rankings. 96 billion U. S. Dollars were released over a period of 13 years. The program over the years changed and expanded to embrace much more than just the top research-intensive institutions. It included institutions that were specialized or more regionally oriented. It also funded teaching and learning excellence. It funded doctoral schools, campus life, promoted better internationalization, better governance and management. So, there were a lot of aspects that were encompassed under this program, and it touched a lot of universities. The funding also tried to address the fragmentation that we talked about between the universities and the grandes écoles and between the universities and the national research organizations. Now the impact I think has been huge and very positive. It has allowed the universities, whether they were in receipt of the funding or not, to become more strategic, to sharpen their profile, to build on their strengths. So better leadership, better governance, better management, more staff, more administrative staff to support what they were trying to do. All in all, it’s been a very positive process.

AU: Moving from research to access or teaching over the past decade or so, it seems to me that France’s problems are similar to ones that we’ve seen here in Canada and in many other countries, which is a growth in student numbers without a corresponding increase in government funding. I guess the difference is here in Canada institutions can offset lack of government funding with higher fee income, either from domestic or international students. That’s not really possible in France. How have French universities responded to resources being spread ever more thinly?

AS: There was an influx of money through the funding that I just described but also there has been an incredible growth of private operators, private providers. This has been under the radar for a very long time to the point where now a quarter of the French students are enrolled in the private sector. There has always been a private sector in France, but this private sector was regulated because it received some public funding. The private sector that has grown a lot is outside this segment and is unregulated. The conversation right now is what to do with it and to regulate it and evaluate it because it’s not happening actually. So, to protect the students with that. This is a major change in France.

AU: The impetus there is that students can’t get into their classes of choice because the universities are too crowded and so they go to the private sector where choice is easier. Is that what’s going on?

AS: Those private institutions are aggressively branding themselves as being places where students will have a much more protective environment, more supportive environment. So, it is attracting students who don’t know very well the system, whose parents don’t know very well the system. They even have come up now with their own parcoursup. The parcoursup being the system, the national system of admission into higher education. They have now come up with their own, which is causing a lot of friction at the moment.

AU: I’m curious about the politics of higher education in France. Are there major differences between left and right on higher education? I’m curious, among recent presidents, say since Chirac, which side or which presidents have been the most active on the higher education front?

AS: This is a complex question because it depends on which left and which right you’re talking about. So, if you take the center left and the center right, I think there is a great deal of consensus on what needs to happen in that there is a stress both on excellence and on democratization of higher education, access, and making sure that the system serves all the whole population. The presidents that that have been the most active, certainly Sarkozy with his law on autonomy. That was a big difference. It made a huge difference in France, and it also established an agency for funding research and the new evaluation agency. There were all sorts of changes that happened under Sarkozy. He’s the one who launched the excellence initiative in France. The others have continued with the excellence initiative. So, François Hollande and now Macron. Macron has made the big splash on the European level with the initiative called the European University Initiative that has had major impact at the European level in that it has created consortia of universities at the European level. Nationally, during his mandate, Parcoursup was developed and enhanced. There was a new law on more money given to research, a focus on student experience. There was a lot of stuff that happened in the first five years of Macron. Now he’s talking about a new law on autonomy. So, we’ll see what happens.

AU: Let me ask you one final question. What makes you optimistic about French higher education? If we were to sit down and have this interview again in 2044, what are the successes you think we’d be talking about?

AS: I think there is a new generation of university presidents that are very strategically oriented. There is a constant scrutiny of the sector. There is a great deal of cooperation amongst them. They try to learn from each other. I’m talking about the universities. So, when we were talking about the competitive side of the system through the excellence initiative has been mitigated, for instance, by having all the universities in receipt of this funding coming together and sharing good practice so they are not competing against one another, but are trying to really raise the level of the whole system together. So, those kinds of things make me optimistic. There are reasons also to be pessimistic. It’s difficult to change higher education. You were interviewing last week the author of Whatever It Is, I’m Against It. So, there is a bit of that here, of course, and the resistance to change or resistance to excellence from some segments of the university communities. It’s not going to be easy.

AU: Andrée, thank you so much for joining us today.

AS: Thank you for having me, Alex.

AU: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Samantha Pufek and you, our listeners, for tuning in. If you have any comments or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. Join us next week when our guest will be…a total mystery! Seriously. Due to unforeseen production hitches, we literally don’t know who will be appearing on the show next week. But I promise you it will be fun!

*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.