In a Le Monde article titled Réussite des étudiants: la revanche des petites universités--Student success: the revenge of the small universities" dated 2 May 2013, Isabelle Rey-Lefebvre discusses the French Ministry of Education's recent publication of a table showing which French universities add value for students studying three-year degree programs and which universities destroy student value.
Before I translate some excerpts from the body of the journalist's description of how small French universities are helping their students to succeed while some of the more prestigious universities are helping them to fail, I will give one of her concluding paragraphs:
"In the depths of the rankings, with clearly negative results compared to what can be expected from their (fairly) haloed performance in the Shanghai Academic Rankings can be found jewels that lose their luster in a purely French setting, such as the University of Paris 6 (Pierre & Marie Curie--73rd in France nationally for 3-year degree programs, 42nd in the Shanghai Rankings) and Paris-11-Orsay (73rd in French national rankings and 37th in the Shanghai rankings)..."
The article is accompanied by a graphic showing the 10 best French Universities for a three-year degree program and the 10 worst. Unfortunately I cannot show it here. The rankings were made according to how much each university adds in value to its three-year degree students or how much it destroys(*). The rankings are below (with urls to the English language welcome pages of the best universities, where possible):
10 best French universities for their 3-year degree programs
How could the University of Paris 11 (Paris Sud - Orsay) be classed 37th in the 2012 Shanghai Ranking yet be rated 69th in France (out of 76 universities) for 3-year degree programs? The same goes for the University of Paris 6 (the University of Pierre and Marie Curie), whose 2012 Shanghai ranking was 42 while the French Ministry of Education gives it a terrible national ranking of 73rd for its three-year degree programs. Here is the list of shame:
"Is the French university system failing? When you read the statistics published by the Ministry of Higher Education and Research in mid-April, the results are not astounding. Only 27% of the 154,144 students enrolled in the first year of a 3-year degree program in France in 2008 were awarded their 3-year degree three years later. If you add the 12% of students who repeated one year and were awarded their degree in 2012, the success rate rises to 40%."
Isabelle Rey-Lefebvre then goes on to describe the extreme variability in the results
"The results are mixed, with 3-year degree success rates varying from 59% to 27%. Only 11 universities show a success rate greater than 50%. Surprisingly, the most successful are the small structures in the French provinces: the universities of Chambery (Savoie), Orleans, Angers--which, not long ago, was threatened with closure because of lack of funding--Clermont-Ferrand, La Rochelle, or Pau, but also the universities to be found in the outer suburbs of Paris: Marne -la-Vallee, Versailles-Saint-Quentin and Evry-Val d'Essonne. All of these smaller universities have fewer than 20,000 students. They are the universities whose survival depends on how attractive they can make themselves to prospective students. The only university in a big city which has a good score is that of "Lyon 2-Louis Lumiere", 30% of whose students are on scholarships and 40% of whom are holding down a job at the same time as they study. It shows a value added score of +10.8 points and is quite happy to have outscored the supposedly more elite rival establishment of the University of Lyon 3."
So, why is there such a difference? The major universities seem to adopt a Darwinian approach to first-year degree students, pushing them to sink or swim (thus the 79.7% overall French university failure rate at the end of the first year in physical science degree programs). The smaller universities feel a sense of responsibility for all of their students. If one of them is tempted to throw in the towel during or at the end of the first year, universities such as Versailles-Saint-Quention will do a lot of behind the scenes work to support them through temporary difficulties or help them find another program more suited to their talents. The smaller universities dedicate their best teaching resources to first year students, while the more prestigious ones only devote real resources to students once they are in the second year or in Masters and Doctoral programs.
Isabelle Rey-Lefebvre's article ends with a couple of quotes:
"Some of the (more prestigious universities) have the resources, but they choose not to use them on their degree programs," notes Daniel Filatre, (an adviser to Geneviève Foraso, the Minister for Education and Research). "They probably need to do less work to attract students and in their major schools, such as Law, professors are probably waiting to see which students they can skim off(**) at the end of the first year, to better support them afterwards.
"Just like that of Shanghai, this ranking is not at all relevant to our type of institution," retorts Jean Chambaz, President of Paris 6, the University of Pierre and Marie Curie. "It adopts a restrictive vision of success. Our audience is less captive (than students who enroll in a university and expect to get their three-year degree there). We draw in many other students during degree programs including those from preparatory classes (the elite crammers where honors high school students go for a couple of years after their baccalauréat, in the effort to get into the Grandes Ecoles system, and thus avoid the university system) who are very successful but who do not fit into the (value-added) criteria. We also have students who leave to to go to (elite) engineering schools. Is that failure? What is certain is that we have room for improvement."
(*) The concept of "value added" used in this study is not too far from that of economic value added, which calculates how much a company adds in value, given its capital base, and how much it destroys. It is explained as follows in the article, "The Ministry calculated a gross rate (the number of students who got their degrees in three years). As this rate is highly correlated with the student's social background, how successful s/he was through high school, and the make-up of other students in the year in which s/he got her baccalaureate (the French national exam sat by students at the end of high school), the Ministry calculates a simulated rate to adjust the data.
The difference between the gross and the simulated rates is called "value added" and shows the difference in the success (or relative failure) of each university's approach to teaching (and supporting their students)." My addition to this, coming from my strong belief that every student should at least leave university having had no harm done to him or her, even if nothing has been added, is to equate the negative values in the French ministry of Educations's tables to "student value destroyed".
(**) "Skimming off" the best students is not a euphemism. As seen in the body of this post, in some cases nearly 80% of students are routinely expected to fail the first year. I mentioned a recent book about the French educational system, "La Machine à trier--The Selection Machine" (by Pierre Cahuc et al.) to a barman friend of mine, who is very bitter about the French educational system and what it did to him. When he heard the title he said the book would have been more aptly named, "La machine à tuer--The Killing Machine".
(***) The illustration at the top of this post is from the Versailles-Saint-Quentin website, where it ornaments a web page that describes a project on the use of lists in medieval times.
Before I translate some excerpts from the body of the journalist's description of how small French universities are helping their students to succeed while some of the more prestigious universities are helping them to fail, I will give one of her concluding paragraphs:
"In the depths of the rankings, with clearly negative results compared to what can be expected from their (fairly) haloed performance in the Shanghai Academic Rankings can be found jewels that lose their luster in a purely French setting, such as the University of Paris 6 (Pierre & Marie Curie--73rd in France nationally for 3-year degree programs, 42nd in the Shanghai Rankings) and Paris-11-Orsay (73rd in French national rankings and 37th in the Shanghai rankings)..."
The article is accompanied by a graphic showing the 10 best French Universities for a three-year degree program and the 10 worst. Unfortunately I cannot show it here. The rankings were made according to how much each university adds in value to its three-year degree students or how much it destroys(*). The rankings are below (with urls to the English language welcome pages of the best universities, where possible):
10 best French universities for their 3-year degree programs
- Versailles-Saint-Quentin (UVSQ), + 13.8 points of added value
- University of Angers, + 13.1 points of added value
- Champollion University (CUFR Nord-Est Midi-Pyrenées), which, for administrative purposes is attached to the University of Toulouse and has teaching centers in Albi, Rodez, Castres and Figeac. +12.2 points of added value.
- Clermont-Ferrand 2, + 11.5 points of added value.
- Lyon 2, + 10.8 points of added value.
- University of La Rochelle, + 10 points of added value.
- University of Savoie (Savoy) at Chambery and Annecy, + 8.4 points of added value
- University of Pau, + 8.2 points of added value.
- University of Marne-la-Vallée (based near Disneyland, in a district heavily populated by children from second-generation immigrant families), with +7.6 points of added value.
- University of Orléans, with 7.6 points of added value.
How could the University of Paris 11 (Paris Sud - Orsay) be classed 37th in the 2012 Shanghai Ranking yet be rated 69th in France (out of 76 universities) for 3-year degree programs? The same goes for the University of Paris 6 (the University of Pierre and Marie Curie), whose 2012 Shanghai ranking was 42 while the French Ministry of Education gives it a terrible national ranking of 73rd for its three-year degree programs. Here is the list of shame:
- University of New Caledonia, 20.4 points of student "value destroyed" (76th in France nationally)
- (75th) French Polynesia, 17.6 points of value destroyed.
- (74th) Bordeaux 1, 13.4 points of value destroyed.
- (73rd) Paris 6, 11.3 points of value destroyed.
- (72nd) Antilles-Guyane (French Guyana in the West Indies), 9.8 points of value destroyed.
- (71st) Montpellier 2, 9.5 points of value destroyed.
- (70th) University of La Réunion, 8.8 points of value destroyed.
- (69th) Paris 11, 8.7 points of value destroyed.
- (68th) Paris 8, 8.4 points of value destroyed.
- (67th in France) Toulouse 2, 7.8 points of student value destroyed
"Is the French university system failing? When you read the statistics published by the Ministry of Higher Education and Research in mid-April, the results are not astounding. Only 27% of the 154,144 students enrolled in the first year of a 3-year degree program in France in 2008 were awarded their 3-year degree three years later. If you add the 12% of students who repeated one year and were awarded their degree in 2012, the success rate rises to 40%."
Isabelle Rey-Lefebvre then goes on to describe the extreme variability in the results
"The results are mixed, with 3-year degree success rates varying from 59% to 27%. Only 11 universities show a success rate greater than 50%. Surprisingly, the most successful are the small structures in the French provinces: the universities of Chambery (Savoie), Orleans, Angers--which, not long ago, was threatened with closure because of lack of funding--Clermont-Ferrand, La Rochelle, or Pau, but also the universities to be found in the outer suburbs of Paris: Marne -la-Vallee, Versailles-Saint-Quentin and Evry-Val d'Essonne. All of these smaller universities have fewer than 20,000 students. They are the universities whose survival depends on how attractive they can make themselves to prospective students. The only university in a big city which has a good score is that of "Lyon 2-Louis Lumiere", 30% of whose students are on scholarships and 40% of whom are holding down a job at the same time as they study. It shows a value added score of +10.8 points and is quite happy to have outscored the supposedly more elite rival establishment of the University of Lyon 3."
So, why is there such a difference? The major universities seem to adopt a Darwinian approach to first-year degree students, pushing them to sink or swim (thus the 79.7% overall French university failure rate at the end of the first year in physical science degree programs). The smaller universities feel a sense of responsibility for all of their students. If one of them is tempted to throw in the towel during or at the end of the first year, universities such as Versailles-Saint-Quention will do a lot of behind the scenes work to support them through temporary difficulties or help them find another program more suited to their talents. The smaller universities dedicate their best teaching resources to first year students, while the more prestigious ones only devote real resources to students once they are in the second year or in Masters and Doctoral programs.
Isabelle Rey-Lefebvre's article ends with a couple of quotes:
"Some of the (more prestigious universities) have the resources, but they choose not to use them on their degree programs," notes Daniel Filatre, (an adviser to Geneviève Foraso, the Minister for Education and Research). "They probably need to do less work to attract students and in their major schools, such as Law, professors are probably waiting to see which students they can skim off(**) at the end of the first year, to better support them afterwards.
"Just like that of Shanghai, this ranking is not at all relevant to our type of institution," retorts Jean Chambaz, President of Paris 6, the University of Pierre and Marie Curie. "It adopts a restrictive vision of success. Our audience is less captive (than students who enroll in a university and expect to get their three-year degree there). We draw in many other students during degree programs including those from preparatory classes (the elite crammers where honors high school students go for a couple of years after their baccalauréat, in the effort to get into the Grandes Ecoles system, and thus avoid the university system) who are very successful but who do not fit into the (value-added) criteria. We also have students who leave to to go to (elite) engineering schools. Is that failure? What is certain is that we have room for improvement."
(*) The concept of "value added" used in this study is not too far from that of economic value added, which calculates how much a company adds in value, given its capital base, and how much it destroys. It is explained as follows in the article, "The Ministry calculated a gross rate (the number of students who got their degrees in three years). As this rate is highly correlated with the student's social background, how successful s/he was through high school, and the make-up of other students in the year in which s/he got her baccalaureate (the French national exam sat by students at the end of high school), the Ministry calculates a simulated rate to adjust the data.
The difference between the gross and the simulated rates is called "value added" and shows the difference in the success (or relative failure) of each university's approach to teaching (and supporting their students)." My addition to this, coming from my strong belief that every student should at least leave university having had no harm done to him or her, even if nothing has been added, is to equate the negative values in the French ministry of Educations's tables to "student value destroyed".
(**) "Skimming off" the best students is not a euphemism. As seen in the body of this post, in some cases nearly 80% of students are routinely expected to fail the first year. I mentioned a recent book about the French educational system, "La Machine à trier--The Selection Machine" (by Pierre Cahuc et al.) to a barman friend of mine, who is very bitter about the French educational system and what it did to him. When he heard the title he said the book would have been more aptly named, "La machine à tuer--The Killing Machine".
(***) The illustration at the top of this post is from the Versailles-Saint-Quentin website, where it ornaments a web page that describes a project on the use of lists in medieval times.