Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on June 30, 2025. The Observatory translated it into English from French. I have edited it, to the best of my ability, to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission.
France has nearly three million students enrolled in higher education. This demographic reality raises a crucial question for public policy: where and how do we train these massive cohorts of young adults expected to enter a constantly changing professional world? Beyond the recurring images of the grandes écoles, it is important to remember a fundamental fact: more than 70 percent of students are enrolled in public institutions, the vast majority of them universities.
Of the 3,500 institutions of higher education in France, 72 are universities. That leaves 3,428 institutions outside the university system. Among these, approximately 3,000 are private institutions of higher education (engineering schools, business schools, private BTS programs, Catholic institutes, etc.).
Approximately 428 are public, including:
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public engineering schools (INP, schools integrated into universities or EPSCPs)
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major institutions (ENS, IEP, INSA, IAE…)
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national advanced engineering schools (EPA)
The comparison of revenue from tuition fees between the public and private sectors is enlightening. Based on a reasonable estimate (€175 on average at university in L3, €600 in public BTS programs), we use an average annual tuition fee of €350 per student in the public sector. Applied to the approximately 2.1 million students concerned (i.e., 70 percent of the three million enrolled), this represents around €735 million in annual revenue. At the same time, the private sector, which comprises the remaining 30 percent, charges average tuition fees of around €3,500 per year (source: MESR, DEPP, Student Life Observatory, and cross-estimations via reports from the Cour des comptes and economic press). This corresponds to a population of around 900,000 students, for a total of €3.15 billion in revenue. The calculation is simple, and the conclusion is unmistakable: public institutions educate more than twice as many students with four times less revenue from tuition.
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An Overwhelming State Allocation for the Operation of the Public Sector
The financial effort of the state constitutes the budgetary foundation of public institutions of higher education and research. In 2023, the total budgetary allocations granted via programs 150 (Higher Education and University Research), 172 (Scientific and Technological Research), and 231 (Student Life) reached approximately €25.75 billion, according to data from the 2023 annual performance report of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research (source: MESR mission, RAP 2023).
Universities receive a total allocation of around €4.06 billion, or approximately 53 percent of their annual resources (source: MESR, DGESIP/SIES, 2021 report on the finances of EPSCPs). Public research organizations (EPSTs) such as the CNRS, INSERM, or INRAE receive between 76 percent and 77 percent of their resources in the form of state allocations. The CNRS, for example, received nearly €2.61 billion in 2021 in allocations for a total budget close to €3.4 billion. These figures reflect an extremely strong dependence of the public sector on state subsidies, in contrast to private structures, which base their economic model primarily on tuition fees. This budgetary model gap also reflects a difference in mission: universal access versus targeted profitability.
One might be surprised by an apparent balance: by adding tuition fees and public allocations, the public sector (with ~€735M in tuition + ~€25.75B in allocations) and the private sector under contract (with ~€3.15B in tuition + an average allocation of €596 per student for EESPIGs, or barely ~€60M) seem to cover comparable totals. But this symmetry is merely an accounting illusion: public institutions host 70 percent of students and educate, with massive state investment, the majority of the nation’s youth. In contrast, the private sector operates mainly on its own resources and serves a smaller, sometimes more selective, population. The state thus dedicates significant budgetary efforts to a majority share of the student population, but whose return on investment capacity is compromised by the very organization of the system.
The Structural Disconnect Between Research and Education
The traditional argument for the strength of the French model lies in the coupling of research and teaching. However, this link is largely theoretical. While universities do indeed host joint research units (CNRS, INSERM, INRAE, INRIA, etc.), senior researchers are rarely involved in undergraduate teaching. The complexity of grant applications, the pressure of European (Horizon Europe) or national (ANR, France 2030) funding, and the publication-driven logic hinder their availability for teaching. Undergraduate students, in most cases, have only very indirect access to active research. This lack of exposure constitutes a deep paradox: public institutions concentrate nearly all fundamental and applied research, yet students benefit from it only marginally. The increasing autonomy of laboratories, the compartmentalization of functions, and the logic of scientific “profitability” break the link that is supposedly established between the production and transmission of knowledge.
To this already complex situation is added a significant institutional paradox. As a means of avoiding the university system, France has historically favored the development of preparatory classes for the grandes écoles (CPGE), designed as elite tracks within high schools. Yet these classes, which will enroll nearly 86,900 students in 2024 according to Campus France, operate entirely outside of any university oversight. It is the high school faculty councils, not university teaching teams, that decide on the awarding of bachelor’s credits for students redirected to the university after one or two years of CPGE, without universities having any say over these validations—this situation is new in the last fifteen years; previously, universities made the decisions. This system, inspired by the model of the classic republican lycée, aims to ensure high academic standards. But it is disconnected from the world of research it claims to prepare students for. CPGE instructors rarely engage in scientific research or participate in research labs, and the content taught, while rigorous, leans more toward intensive lecture-based teaching than an initiation to knowledge production. This structural compartmentalization leads to a dead end: around 13 percent of CPGE students—more than 11,000 young people per year—return to the university, not as a matter of intellectual continuity, but as a fallback after failing to gain admission to a grande école. This path, conceived as a “second chance,” is paradoxically experienced as a failure, even though their results make them, in many disciplines, the top candidates for the agrégation and the top ranks of the CAPES, which they increasingly abandon due to its lack of attractiveness. Over the past twenty years, private schools and IEPs have created parallel admissions (AP) to siphon off this pool of talent produced at great public expense by the CPGE system, further depleting the universities.
In sum, the French system exposes a problematic dissociation: the producers of knowledge—professor-researchers, authors of scientific publications—are in the universities, but the elite tracks supposedly preparing students for this knowledge are run by high schools and now by private higher education institutions and IEPs, which have also devalued entrance exams and intensive work in order to attract top students without requiring effort, using the AP system to compensate for the lack of training in the initial cohorts. This decoupling weakens the continuity between education and research and contributes to the declining clarity of the university model within the higher education ecosystem—not to mention the loss of purpose for professor-researchers who no longer understand the point of their teaching mission.
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The Failure of Mass Professionalization
Despite regulatory efforts and the creation of programs such as professional bachelor’s degrees, cross-disciplinary skill units, or job-integration modules, universities remain structurally unfit to meet the needs of the productive sector. The teacher-to-student ratio, the generality of course content, and the lack of interfaces with local actors drastically limit the effect of these initiatives. The university ecosystem also suffers from a lack of networking and mediation. By contrast, private institutions offset the relative weakness of their academic supervision with a highly pragmatic orientation toward the job market: industrial partnerships, steering committees, individualized support, mock interviews, and guest lectures from professionals. Their ability to assess the real needs of the economic fabric allows them to ensure a much higher rate of job placement. Career observatories like Syntec, which are accustomed to working with small institutions more capable of adapting to their demands, ignore the academic meaning of course titles. On the other hand, more agile private institutions are unafraid to tailor course titles to the needs of the labor market. Is there a need for a “media manager” to know how to run a meeting? ESSEC immediately creates a course: “meeting management,” while programs in the humanities and social sciences continue to teach “research methodology.”
A Structural Contradiction to Be Rethought
The current situation reflects a contradiction: the public sector bears the brunt of the educational mission without having the operational capacity or budgetary recognition to match its responsibilities. In close collaboration with research organizations, it develops cutting-edge knowledge at the forefront of international science, but without an educational equivalent for the generation it serves. A rebalancing is necessary: strengthening the links between research and teaching, restoring a clear professional purpose to university programs—though nothing will be effective without prior selection or the creation of preparatory years (formerly called propedeutic years) since, in the current system, the main function of undergraduate studies is, at great cost, to filter among high school graduates the third or quarter who are capable of obtaining a bachelor’s degree, a task that was once performed by high schools—and allowing for the revaluation of the pedagogical mission within public higher education. Without such reforms, France risks widening a permanent gap between its scientific capabilities and the actual education of its youth. The republican meritocracy, long upheld by the university system, could well become a statistical illusion if we do not massively reinvest in this crucial link of the national educational compact. Already, France has experienced a collapse in its capacity to produce scientific patents, with the annual number divided by six over a few decades—a regression unseen among our competitors.
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Image: “Auditorium of the Faculty of Law and Political Science, Aix-Marseille University, Aix-en-Provence, France” by Smuconlaw on Wikimedia Commons
