To Paris, where a couple of big changes in education policy have led to student demonstrations.  Not particularly large or effective demonstrations (not yet, anyway), but significant nonetheless.

The first – and for our purpose less important – set of changes are to the structure of the baccalauréat (which, confusingly for English speakers, refers to secondary school diplomas rather than undergraduate degrees which are called “licence”).  The new Bac rules – and as far as I can tell these only apply to the academic or “Bac générale”, not the more vocationally-oriented technical or professional Bacs –  do four things.  First, they replace the three current “streams” (science, economics/social science, literature) and replace them with a “common core” plus eight “specialties” from which students may pick three in 11^th grade and two in 12^th.  Second, they reduce the number of final exams from ten to four (two of which – French and Philosophy – are mandatory with the other two coming from the two grade 12 specialties).  Third, they add a 20-30 minute oral exam to the written finals.  Fourth and finally, they reduce the value of the final exams within the final score to just 60%, with more emphasis on everyday course work.  This is mostly to the good, in the sense that they reduce high-stakes testing, but some people suggest that the purpose of the common core is to increase class sizes, so protests are apparently in order.  (If you are interested in more, the best short explainer I have found is this one from the ever-informative Figaro Etudiant).

The bigger reform is the one to the university system and it is a doozy.  The French higher education admission system is maybe the most fiendishly complicated one in the world outside of the United States.  This sounds odd to anyone who has heard the simplified version of the system, i.e. anyone who graduates with a baccalauréat has a right to a place in a public university.  Which is true so far as it goes except:

• Over ten percent of the system is private because Catholicism.
• “Public Universities” does not include “les grandes écoles”, which includes not just the schools you’ve heard of like Polytechnique, Sciences Po, and ENA, but 100-odd specialist engineering and business schools as well.  These have selective entry, and many require students to take and extra 1-2 years of specialist “prépa” (preparatory) schooling, which takes place in the fancier, selective lycées.
• “Public universities” also excludes certain schools-within-universities known as “instituts universitaires de technologie (IUTs)”, which basically teach short-course engineering programs (not entirely unlike advanced tech programs in Canadian polytechnics) to which entry is also selective.
• Some programs something called PACES (which is basically a common first year program for all health programs including Nursing, Dentistry, Medicine, etc) deliberately accept large numbers of students with every intention of failing large numbers of them during first year to get class sizes down to a reasonable level.
• While a place in a public university is guaranteed, a place in a program of a students’ choice is not.  Law, kinesiology, psychology, and PACES are hugely popular and vastly oversubscribed, which over time has led many institutions to institute admissions lotteries.

It’s this last problem that the new reform aims to solve because Oh. My. God. if there is one thing that enrages bourgeois sensibilities around the world it’s the idea that they might invest a ton of cultural capital into their children and still see them lose out on a place in the sun because of something like *chance* (as if accidents of birth weren’t the driving force in access to begin with).  And so, the government has decided to allow institutions to begin using greater selection at the undergraduate level.

Cue outrage on the left, where it is believed – not without reason – that selection only favours the bourgeois. The problem of course is that a) the left has accepted selection in the rest of the system for decades so what’s the big deal extending it a bit more now and b) the alternative is more money for universities to expand in specific fields of study, which historically no government of either the right or left has wanted to give to universities, nor have they given them permission to raise on their own through fees.  Once you rule those out, the only real policy choice is between selection, increasingly crowded classes, and more lotteries.  Personally, I’d probably go with option three, but try running for election on that platform.

Though the Paris demos to date have been small (possibly because the weather lately has been particularly awful with floods and record snowfall and whatnot), but you never know: an emotive issue, coupled with some good weather and some slogans that at least semi-plausibly tie students’ naked self-interest in higher education policy to some noble cause like defeating neo-liberalism and bang! Printemps érable all over again.  Keep an eye on this story; it might yet get hot.