The mere word is so explosive that Nicolas Sarkozy, Valérie Pécresse and Xavier Darcos refuse to pronounce it, while responsible people on the left will not hesitate to equate it with fascism.
For an outsider, this requires some explanation as anyone can see that higher education here is already highly selective, with elite grandes écoles for a tiny “happy few” who can afford preparatory classes, and underfunded, dysfunctional, striking universities(which kick half the students out anyway in the first year) for the bewildered masses. Selection not only exists; it permeates the system. It is, in fact, the raison d’être of the French elite.
Why then, this ridiculous pretense that “selection” in the universities will be the end to the republican ideal, democracy and life as we know it?
Or, asked a different way. Who benefits from the status quo? And how?
First, the elites.
Top positions in government and business are reserved for graduates of grandes écoles. University graduates are looked on with distrust bordering on contempt. This two-tier system confers a huge advantage on the elites whose children monopolize the grandes écoles. To preserve their superiority, they have every reason to defend the system as it is. That part is easy.
The mystery resides more with the left.
University professors know perfectly well (and will admit in private) that the first year is basically wasted. A shocking number of students lack adequate skills. Classes are overcrowded, chaotic, miserable. Half the student population will be forced to drop out. The quality of education suffers, as do students and teachers personally. Strikes, degradation of property and cancelled classes are common. (Fifteen weeks of canceled classes this year.) Professors rarely have office hours. Libraries are overcrowded and frequently closed. Even those students who manage to struggle through are likely to be unemployed or underemployed.
Why, then, does the left support this massive fraud against the children of the middle and lower middle classes?
Leaving ideology aside, what this huge and uncontrolled influx of “students” offers is numbers. Bodies. Flesh. Masses of young people to be taught translates into large numbers of teaching positions. Jobs—not for students—but for teachers. And, for teachers, (who would otherwise be unemployed themselves) this is clearly a strong argument for leaving things as they are…
But there is another great advantage to parking such huge numbers of 18-25 year olds in the public universities. Unemployment. Students are not officially unemployed. Throw them out of the universities and they hit the statistics. This hurts the government, left or right, whichever it happens to be. It is a brave government, indeed, that deliberately ups its youth unemployment numbers.
And then there is fear. Every Education Minister, left or right, that has attempted to deal with this problem has been forced to resign following massive demonstrations.
Of course, many parents, seeing the universities for the catastrophe they are, have decided to enroll their children in private vocational schools to learn useful skills that will lead to a job. These schools generally cost about 5000 euros a year, making a mockery of the “free” higher education argument favored by defenders of the current system.
Why has the French press not seized the chance to elucidate this very French mystery?
Doubly mysterious, indeed.
For info, a sample of articles about selection in the universities from Le Point:
Luc Ferry in trouble for thinking about selection
Obit of Pierre Monory, who also tried and failed to introduce selection
Paris II slips some selection into its law faculty
Ezra Suleiman denounces elites for hypocrisy in preserving privileges
Valérie Pécresse excludes selection at university entrance arguing "selection already exists!"
"à la Sorbonne, le budget par étudiant est de 3 300 euros, trois fois moins qu'un lycéen, 15 fois moins qu'un normalien, et 33 fois moins qu'un étudiant de Princeton" - Jean-Robert Pitte, le président de l'université Paris-IV http://www.lepoint.fr/actualites-societe/2007-01-17/universite-la-colere-d-un-president/920/0/10961
NEWSFLASH : In a stunning departure from tradition Valérie Pécresse has kept her job EVEN THOUGH SHE INTRODUCED REFORMS !!
