00:00And here in France it's back to school time for the country's university students and to discuss this
00:05Solange Mougen joins us in the studio. Solange, you've done an assessment of sorts of French universities. How are they doing?
00:12Well, I thought I'd start with the good news and then we'll get into some of the issues of this
00:17rentrée universitaire or back-to-school week.
00:23In France, the good news is that French universities are doing pretty well from a global ranking standpoint.
00:28Of course, such rankings need to be taken with a grain of salt because they are not the end-all and be-all
00:33in a judge of quality of schools.
00:35But nonetheless, France currently has three universities in the top 50 of the Shanghai ranking list.
00:41They are Paris-Saclay, which comes in 12th. It has multiple Grandes Ecoles or France's most prestigious universities in it.
00:48Saclay was also ranked the world's top eight research clusters by Technology Review.
00:54Then coming in 33rd on the Shanghai list, we have PSL or the Paris Sciences and Letters University.
01:00And then of course the ever-famous Sorbonne. It is ranked 41st.
01:05If we stick with this global ranking, France has 18 universities in the top 500.
01:11Of course, this is far behind the United States, which has for decades made a name for itself internationally
01:17with 21% of the world's foreign students or 1.5 million people
01:22going to study in the U.S.
01:23But French and European universities, well, they're catching up.
01:26If we take business schools, for example, five out of ten of the top ones are in France according to the FT's ranking and
01:34the number of international students in French business schools, well, it has doubled in the past five years.
01:40Now, such recognition obviously helps to attract both French and international students.
01:46So why has this become so increasingly important?
01:50Well, the short answer is financing, but soft power politics and, of course, the transmission of knowledge.
01:56They're also at play here.
01:58In 2007, a law gave French universities more autonomy over their budgets.
02:02Critics of this move, they say that it actually has created a split between schools, between the haves and have-nots,
02:08and thus the have-and-have-nots of students as well.
02:11That the principle of égalité or an equal, affordable education for all has actually taken a hit here.
02:17And all of this comes in a rather bleak financial context for French public universities.
02:24Their provisional budget deficit is 4.5 billion euros this year.
02:29In February, the government cut 3 percent or over 900 million euros from its nearly 32 billion euro budget.
02:37A third of the state-owned university buildings are subpar and in need of major repairs.
02:43And on top of this, teaching jobs are increasingly being given out as vacataire work or as temporary stints
02:50because those guest lecture-like contracts, well, they cost about a fifth of the tenured track professor classes.
02:57These contracts are up 30 percent in the past seven years.
03:01So many say that these public service jobs, like those in hospitals, well, they're being squeezed and degraded.
03:06And those are concerns which are shared by academics across the world at the moment.
03:10But certainly some schools here in France are trying to attract foreign students to help the budget, aren't they?
03:15They are. This year, there are nearly three million enrolled university students in France.
03:20Of them, there are thought to be around 400,000 international students.
03:24The government hopes, with its so-called Bienvenue en France push, to bring that number up to 500,000 by 2027.
03:32Why? Well, foreign students pay higher fees, even if the public school fees in France are relatively small
03:38compared to other nations like the U.S. and the U.K.
03:41And once you remove the cost that the state pays for things like health care,
03:46well, these students bring in over a billion euros in economic spending overall.
03:52There's also a soft power element here.
03:53Foreign students, well, they become a relay of sorts of French values and knowledge when they return to their home countries,
04:00which some 80 percent of them do in the ten years following their studies.
04:05There is a political side to this as well.
04:06Restrictions that were part of Macron's immigration on foreign students, well, they have been scrapped.
04:12But it did create some questions among some about whether French foreign students feel welcome here in France.
04:17And you're talking there, Solange, about international students.
04:20What's the case for their French compatriots?
04:22Well, like many universities that are counting their pennies, so are students.
04:28For this school year, the entrance fees have increased by three percent,
04:31putting an end to a cap that was in place since 2019.
04:35According to FAGE, a main student group of associations, the average budget this year
04:41for the start of this year is 3,000 euros for the rentrée.
04:44And it's nearly double of that for foreign students.
04:47Now, the main challenge for students remains affordable housing.
04:51University housing only accounts for dorms, only account for a tiny fraction of student rooms.
04:58So many students are desperately searching for places.
05:01In September, it's a yearly thing.
05:03Some have even had to turn to Airbnbs, churches and their cars even because of the shortage of dorms.
05:09Now, with inflation, there's also increasingly a food problem for students.
05:12According to FAGE, this student association, some 19 percent say they don't have enough to eat.
05:18Since 2020, there has been a one euro per meal program in place for scholarship students, which helps.
05:25But there's also been an uptick of students going to soup kitchens as well,
05:29which is a sign that when it comes to boosting France's rankings on education, the basics like housing and food,
05:36well, they are also part of the bigger picture of investing in future generations.
05:41Indeed. Thank you so much, Solange Mejean, for that.
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