• BookTalk.org News will soon go out via email in HTML format. The goal will be to keep people posted on our current book discussions and other relevant news items.
• Contest #2: "On The Importance of Reading" has started. Visit the Contests forum - the very top thread.
Please support our free community by making a credit card donation through our secure PayPal account. We appreciate and depend on the generosity of our members. Thank you!
Number of students enrolled in French universities:
60,000 in 1938
300,000 in 1968
1,515,000 in 2001 (Wikipedia).
We still speak of our universities as being "virtually free" because we know how expensive this can be overseas.
I've checked the fees for 2008 (set by Ministry decree, so no variations):
165 euros (per year) for undergraduate students (257 US $)
215 euros for students preparing a master's.
326 euros for PHD students.
When I was a student in the 80's it would have been less than 50 euros per year.
There is no selection to enter our universities, all you need is a pass mark for our end of school examination , the Baccalauréat. A pass mark is an average of 10/20. I still don't know what the equivalent in the American school system would be: mathematically on a system of A B C D E F the equivalent should be a C but in my experience it didn't work like this.
The way the system gets rid of unmotivated or incapable students is by failing some of them at the end of the first or the second year (again a pass grade is 10/20).
I can't say that it didn't work in the past. The Baccalauréat used to be a serious exam and passing meant something.
Anyway, it was felt that this was fine but you needed to offer something else for people who felt more competitive: and that is our Grandes Ecoles system.
The wikipedia article on this is excellent, and here is the beginning:
Quote:
The Grandes écoles (French: literally "Grand Schools" or "Elite Schools") of France are higher education establishments outside the mainstream framework of the public universities system. Unlike French public universities which have an obligation to accept all candidates of the same region who hold a Baccalauréat in the same academic field, the selection criteria of Grandes écoles rests mainly on competitive written and oral exams, undertaken by students of dedicated preparatory classes. They do not have a large student body (3,000 at the largest establishment; most have a few hundred students each year) and are generally focused on a single subject area, mainly engineering, business or humanities.
They have traditionally produced most of France's high ranking civil servants, politicians and executives as well as many scientists and philosophers.
Before we look at the Grandes Ecoles themselves, what is important to understand is the first two years in the "Classes Préparatoires", or "classes prépa". This also works as a parallel system to the first two years at university. They are entirely free, as in zero euro, but there is a selection on the basis of your grades and student reports at the lycée.
The students in classes prépa are automatically enrolled at the university which is nearest to the prépa, and at the end of the two years they get get the credits they would have had if they had studied at university. Then they either go to a Grande Ecole, if they manage that hurdle (the hardest one), or they go to university in third year.
It may sound strange but it works.
The French absolutely love prestigious schools and exams, this is seen as something really important in intellectual life.
When I was a student I didn't think much of someone who was just a university professor (although I noticed that the professors thought very highly of themselves), but if you taught at the Ecole Polytechnique, or Sciences Politiques, now that was something.
In short, the equivalent of "I went to Harvard" is not "I went to such and such university" (nobody cares , they'll think that's the least you could do),
but "I went to ENA" or "I went to Polytechnique". This will garantee silent and respectful admiration (as well as immediate job offers).
Most of our policitians went to ENA, my conclusion being that if they make mistakes, it's entirely their own doing, the state did not stint on their education.
Sarkozy is "only" a lawyer (this is felt to be acceptable, and also he does everything differently from everybody else).
Now you can imagine the bewilderment of the good people of France when we heard that people like Ronald Reagan were elected president in the US.
The schools which offer the first two years (classes préparatoires) are graded nationally, the two best ones being Louis-le-Grand and Henri IV in Paris.
The wiki link I have given above shows you a photo of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.
That will, incidentally, give you an idea of what my school looks like.
My school is, like the two schools above, a secondary school and a Classes Préparatoires lycée. We are one of those "prépas de province" provincial, as opposed to the prestigious Parisian schools. The best pupils from all over France go those Parisian prepas, but in the scientific classes my school does very well-- that is, at provincial level.
When I use "province" it sounds like "outside Paris" but in this context, used by a real Parisian, there's a world of meaning.
Now of course one mustn't imagine that all our high schools look like this.
There would be typically one or two such schools in each large town (large by our standards) , and the others are new buildings. Often they were built in the 1960's and 1970's, and they look dreadful.
Many of those lycées were built under Napoleon. In my school there is a plaque which informs you that the school was built by Imperial Decree signed by Napoleon at such and such battlefield... When I walk past it, I sometimes think of Napoleon standing on a hill, watching the battlefield on the plain below while dictating things to ten secretaries. At one stage he would turn to one of them and say "I want a lycée opened in that town. You will call it..."
My school boasts a writer as a former pupil (Balzac) and two writers as teachers (Léopold Senghor and André Gide).
Here is the Wikipedia entry for lycée. The text is for those who really want the details, but the photo of the 19th C lycée is interesting because it's typical. This is a view of the Cour d'Honneur, the official entrance (forbidden to pupils in my school).
The building you see would continue to the right and left and be entirely reserved for the administration. On the right, the secretaries' office and the headmaster and deputy heads. On the left, the bursar's office (possibly the other way round). Between the two, a wide central corridor with marble plaques (marble floors are a possibility) about former students who died in the two world wars, and famous former pupils.
You may also find a marble plaque with the name of all headmasters in gold letters.
Look at the first and second floors: those are the the apartments of the head, his deputies, and the burser. Imagine immense rooms with very high ceilings, everything stately and orderly. Typically they had three stories where we would now fit four.
On the side facing the Cour d'Honneur you hear neither noise from the students or the traffic.
Typically also, there's a clock like the one you see in the photo. The one in my school doesn't work, and some of the local people regularly write to the headmaster to ask about this. They're tried to have it fixed, but it's too ancient, so it's always... five to three.
Past this first building, you will find the school yard and some other buildings (usually not in the photos) where some 1500 pupils and staff are sharing the rest of the space (the original school not having been planned for so many people).
"Only one of France's 82 universities makes it into Shanghai University's top 50 ranking. Auditoriums are over-crowded, campuses drab and deserted on weekends. Some 46% of all first-year undergraduates drop out. The brightest students do their best to avoid universities altogether..."
At least Sarkozy seems to be doing something about this...
I'll go back to the description of University and Grandes Ecoles first.
In some fields you have a choice, and in some fields there's only one way.
University only: Medicine, Pharmacy, Law.
Grandes Ecoles only: Enginnering, veterinary School.
Business, though there are probbably a lot more ways
of studying business than I'm aware of.
If you can't get into one of the prrestigious Grandes Ecoles there are a lot of private schools which deliver non-prestige displomas-- for a lot of money (dubbed "petite école").
University or Grande Ecole: Maths, physics, sciences (not leading to an engineering degree), and Humanities.
Camacho wrote:
Quote:
"Only one of France's 82 universities makes it into Shanghai University's top 50 ranking.
The University is a public service, it's free and it's not selective. Given that, we don't expect our universities to make it to the top worldwide, since other countries use selection, but I wouldn't expect them to be at the bottom either.
Every year over 600,000 students sit for the Baccalauréat, and 300,000 enrol at university. I think this says it all, brilliance doesn't come into it.
For excellence we think of the Grandes Ecoles.
In the fields where there is selection, such as medicine, I expect we do as well as other western countries.
(Medicine has drastic selection exams at the end of the first year).
"Auditoriums are over-crowded, campuses drab and deserted on weekends. "
Yes, auditoriums are over-crowded in first and second year. We have a problem with the (lack of) selection system.
Governments have never wanted to make a choice by either introducing a selection in first year or financing the numbers of students that come and will not be able to follow or succeed.
Sarkozy is very good at making a lot of noise and saying that with him everything is going to be different, but his "reform" of university (which is about 6 months old) has not tackled the essential issues at all.
Universities still have no control over enrolment.
We have never had university campuses. The oldest universities were built in city centres, and in the twentieth century there would have been no room for enlargement.
Then new universities or new buildings were added starting in the 1960's, looking no better than any buildings from this period.
The newer ones (from the 1980's onwards) look better, and there may be some space and lawns around them.
In any case a university for us consists of auditoriums, classrooms, administrative offices and a library, so it's not surprising there should be little activity at weekends.
Who were you quoting? I think this would be typical of a journalist who describes a situation he does not understand.
Starting in the 1960's they started building student dormitaries and "restaurants universitaires"-- not necessarily next to the school buildings-- but where there was space-- still within the city limits though.
The dorms were created as help for students who can't afford private accomodation, so whether a student qualifies depends on his parents' income. Again, if they were built in the sixties, they were built cheaply and yes, they will look drab.
We don't have a word for "campus"; about twenty years ago the English word was made part of our language-- first to describe the American campuses we saw on television, and then perhaps because it sounded good.
My year at Cape Town University (1980) was my first and only contact with a campus. UCT is built on a hill, far from the city centre. The buildings are stylish, there are banks, numerous tennis courts and squash courts, etc... I was dazzled, but I knew that if there had been anything this beautiful in France it would have been reserved for the rich. Tuition fees were very high, and the only reason reason I could afford them was that the exchange rate was decidedly in my favour.
Now as for the actual learning, I had enrolled in English classes for English-speaking students, 2nd and third year classes, and it may sound surprising because I was comparing with the education I was getting in France in English as a second language, I thought UCT was not bad but France was better (!).
Posted: Wed May 21, 2008 4:12 pm Post subject: University, or Classes Préparatoires?
University, or Classes Préparatoires?
In some fields you can do either, so the student makes a choice.
If you need to work part time to finance your studies (even with no tuition fees you still need to pay for housing and food), university is the place.
It is meant to accomodate those extra activities.
The Classes Préparatoires will leave you no room for anything else-- although there is an evolution, as with everything else. For example I was very surprised to hear from my colleagues who work in classes prépa at my school that for students nowadays being extremely serious and busy meant just that, Monday to Friday-- even to wipe out your competition, studying on a weekend does not seem to be conceivable, it goes without saying that weekends are for parties and sleeping late.
Anyway, about the choice.
The classes préparatoires will give you instruction in your major and will somehow put pressure on you so that you also study other subjects as advanced subjects.
Engineering students will study maths, science and engineering, plus a foreign language, history, geography, French and philosophy.
To enter the best Grandes Ecoles, they will be selected mostly on things like French and English-- the idea being that they are all excellent at maths, and those who are also excellent in English will get in.
When you have a choice, you may choose the classes prépa because you want to avoid the first two years at university with all the problems.
Recently I've heard another type of reasoning which I found amusing.
The student will sometimes say "I'm not interested in the Grandes Ecoles but I'll still take the classes prépa because I know I'm lazy. If I don't have teachers watching me and putting pressure on me I won't study."
It wasn't meant like this, but the classes prépa offer a solution for a problem that seems to occur more and more often: a wish to learn coupled with a certain leaning towards laziness.
The university is good for students who are motivated and need some freedom to organize themselves. I don't know how much things have changed, but when I was a student they really left you alone and this suited me very well.
At university you would have exams twice a year, but with the classes prépa you get tests all the time, and you write 4-hour papers every Wednesday afternoon. Also you have to go to school, we have a roll call at the beginning of every period, the student has to write justifications if he doesn't come, and there is very little truancy.
