Grandes écoles resist attempts to end their cloistered existence

Sarkozy wants France’s elite grandes écoles to set aside 30 per cent of admissions for students from poor backgrounds

WITH THE sun breaking through the bare branches and sweeping across a carpet of newly fallen snow, the cloister-style courtyard of the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) on rue d’Ulm looked even more picturesque than usual on Friday morning. Half-a-dozen students braved the icy cold and sat drinking coffee by the fountain while, inside, the corridors were abuzz with the din of the new term.

As one of the most prestigious of France’s elite grandes écoles, the ENS finds itself at the heart of an acrimonious debate over access to third-level education. That debate reached a new pitch in the past week when the heads of the institutions drew the ire of government for baulking at a plan that would force them to take in more students from poor families.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy has made opening up the grandes écoles – traditional finishing schools for leaders of politics, industry and the professions – a centrepiece of his agenda for equality of opportunity. He wants them to set aside 30 per cent of new admissions for students from low-income backgrounds.

But in recent days, the Conférence des Grandes Écoles, a representative group, said it would resist any “admissions quota”, arguing that it would “inevitably lead to a drop in the academic level” and would undermine the colleges’ meritocratic principles.

The government reacted swiftly, with French minister for education Luc Chatel saying he found “shocking” the suggestion that more poor students would lower academic standards and devalue degrees.

The majority of students who pass the baccalauréat (equivalent to the Leaving Cert) take courses in a university system that has been poorly funded and overcrowded for decades and where the drop-out rate is 25 per cent. Outside that system, some 220 well-resourced grandes écoles serve the remaining 6 per cent, who gain admission, in most cases, by way of a competitive entrance exam.

At the most prestigious, which include the École Polytechnique (the foremost engineering school), the École Nationale d’Administration (alma mater of government ministers and senior civil servants) and the HEC (a top business college), the student body is overwhelmingly white and middle-class. At the École Polytechnique, just 11 per cent of students are grant-aided.

“It’s visible. You don’t need statistics to see that there are very few people from disadvantaged backgrounds [here],” said Pierre de Villemereuil, a student at the ENS, a traditional route into careers in academia and government. None of the half-dozen ENS students who spoke to this reporter disagreed about the need to improve access to the grandes écoles. But there was unanimous discomfort with the idea of imposing quotas or meddling with the concours, or entrance exam.

According to Jean-Baptiste Deyzac, a humanities student, the state’s efforts should be focused on helping disadvantaged but motivated young people in the years before they sit the concours. To reach a grande école, most school-leavers spend two additional years cramming for the exams in classes prépa, and it is at that stage that intervention is required, he argued. (An initiative begun by former French president Jacques Chirac means that, as of last September, 30 per cent of prépa students are grant-aided).

“I come from a comfortable background, but my parents would not have done,” Deyzac said. “There is clearly a need to reform, I think, but first the whole issue has to be clearly set out, and that’s not being done at the moment.”

Another student, Erwan Scornet, imagined there would be a “sense of injustice” among those who passed the exam “if people were being favoured because of their background”.

For fellow normalien Nicolas Aude, it is through “cultural capital” as much as “financial capital” that the concours act as a social filter, as they privilege those children who were brought to museums regularly or who grew up in houses filled with books. The case for reform is incontrovertible, he said, “but how to reform without questioning the principle of the concours?” Attempting to calm the debate, the government has said the 30 per cent admission rate is a target and not a quota, though it maintains that the colleges should change their recruitment policies. The body representing grandes écoles has duly said it shares the objective.

Some colleges have taken initiatives of their own to improve access. Unlike some grandes écoles, the ENS does not charge a fee for its entrance exam, while the Institut d’Études Politiques (Sciences Po) in Paris has pioneered a scheme which spots talented pupils in poor districts, then tutors and tests them before offering them places without the concours.

The director of Sciences Po, Richard Descoings, is impatient for others to follow suit. “A handful of very selective schools are training a handful of students, who often excel at what they do but who are becoming more and more closed off from French society,” he said. “And this is serious.”