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Eternal Students
Every nation has its eternal students, but France seems to specialise in their production. Observers of student protests will notice scruffy thirtysomethings marching alongside fresh-faced youth. Not teachers, as you might expect, but fellow students, who entered higher education a decade or more ago and remained there long after it became undignified to do so.
Why hang on so long? Job prospects for young people in France haven't been good for a while; many students prefer to remain in university, adding qualifications (or not) until the promise of a secure state job arises. Better than sitting around on the dole. Others enjoy the lifestyle. For others, it's their identity. Describing themselves as "political activists", they organise protests (most often against proposed changes to the educational system). Fifteen years in university is a good way to ensure that your political convictions, which remain those of a teenager, are rarely tested against reality.
Private sector employers despair of the current state of the French education system and its products. Unlike the British system, those who leave French schools are more are less literate and numerate. However, they are deeply averse to taking courses and gaining skills which employers might find useful.
French universities, which by law must take practically any student who qualifies and which struggle to differentiate themselves by offering better courses or motivating their professors, languish outside the top 50 in some lists of the world's top colleges, which are dominated mostly by American colleges, with Britain's Cambridge and Oxford usually in the top five.
The French, along with other European nations, dispute these lists as being Anglo-centric (even if one is compiled in Shanghai partly with European Commission funding). They argue, with reason, that France's elite grands écoles are at least the equal of US and UK colleges but are not geared towards scoring points on league tables. France has state research centres, such as the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, which are not attached to universities but do some of the world's most advanced research work.
Nevertheless, most reports on the state of France universities make for grim reading. Successive education ministers are aware of the numerous problems, but have found even minor reforms resisted by lecturers (who are civil servants) and students.
France's attachment to learning for learning's sake is appealing in many ways: Students don't often take degrees in Estate Agency and Marketing among the dreaming spires of the nation's most prestigious colleges, though excellent business schools exist for those inclined towards vocational degrees or MBAs.
What is worrying, though, is that at any given time, France is home to a quarter of Europe's psychology undergraduates. 65,000 youngsters (and not-so-youngsters) are soaking up the basics of psychology in lectures all over the country. And that's not counting the tens of thousands studying sociology.
The BBC has a nice story on ambition (or lack of) among a group of French students. There's the typical eternal student, who is happy to remain in university forever, and who probably will because colleges are unable to start charging serious fees to those who study there. There's a 23 year old, who is actually keen to get out of university (she is "overqualified") but fears there is no work on offer.
And then, in comparison, there are a group of children from disadvantaged backgrounds who don't expect the state to hold their hand for the rest of their lives. The BBC's hack finds a girl training to be a waitress and keen to "get on with life", and a 20 year old who says, "You can't say the government has to help me because I don't have parents - I can't blame them. Young people are often lazy and think everything is owed to them but we need to work and to prove ourselves and then we can have dignity."
This fellow, who lives in cheap lodgings, spends his evenings teaching himself English and Japanese. Unfortunately, his ambition is to get into university and study psychology...
