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% of students are enrolled in public institutions, the vast majority of them universities.

A major teaching mission achieved with minimal resources

Of the 3 higher education institutions in France, 500 are universities. This leaves 72 non-university institutions. Of these, approximately 3 are private higher education institutions (engineering schools, business schools, private BTS (vocational training institutes), Catholic institutes, etc.).

Approximately 428 are public, including:

An overwhelming allocation from the State to the functioning of the public sector

The State's financial effort constitutes the budgetary foundation of public higher education and research institutions. In 2023, the total budgetary allocations allocated through programs 150 (Higher Education and University Research), 172 (Scientific and Technological Research) and 231 (Student Life) reached approximately 25,75 billion euros, 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% of their annual resources (source: MESR, DGESIP/SIES, 2021 report on EPSCP finances). Research organizations (EPST) such as the CNRS, INSERM, or INRAE ​​receive between 76% and 77% of their resources in the form of state grants. The CNRS, for example, received nearly €2021 billion in grants in 2,61 for a total budget of close to €3,4 billion. These figures demonstrate the public sector's extremely high dependence on state subsidies, unlike private structures, which base their economic model primarily on tuition fees. This gap in budgetary model also reflects a gap in mission: universal access versus targeted profitability.

One might be surprised by the apparent balance: by adding registration fees and public funding, the public sector (with ~€735 million in tuition + ~€25,75 billion in funding) and the private sector under contract (with ~€3,15 billion in tuition + an average funding of €596/student for EESPIGs, or barely ~€60 million) appear to cover comparable amounts. But this symmetry is only an accounting mirage: public institutions welcome 70% of students and, with massive state investment, train the majority of the nation's youth. Conversely, the private sector operates mainly on its own resources and supports a smaller, sometimes more selective, public. The state therefore devotes significant budgetary efforts to a majority of the student population, but whose capacity for return on investment is compromised by the very organization of the system.

The structural disconnect between research and training

The traditional argument for the richness of the French model lies in the coupling between research and teaching. However, this link is in reality largely theoretical. While universities do host joint research units (CNRS, INSERM, INRAE, INRIA, etc.), established researchers are rarely involved in undergraduate teaching. The complexity of calls for projects, the pressure of European (Horizon Europe) or national (ANR, France 2030) funding, and the logic of publication hamper their pedagogical availability. Undergraduate students, in the majority of cases, have only very indirect access to active research. This lack of exposure constitutes a profound paradox: public institutions concentrate almost all fundamental and applied research, but students benefit only marginally. The growing autonomy of laboratories, the sectorization of functions, and the logic of scientific "profitability" break the link that is supposed to establish between knowledge production and transmission.

Adding to this already complex situation is a far-reaching institutional paradox. In a logic of avoiding the university system, France has historically favored the rise of preparatory classes for the grandes écoles (CPGE), designed as elite programs integrated within high schools. Yet, these classes, which will enroll nearly 86 students in 900 according to Campus France, operate outside of any university control. It is the high school class councils, and not the university teaching teams, that decide on the allocation of bachelor's degree credits for students redirected to university after one or two years of CPGE, without the universities having the slightest influence on these validations (this situation is new in the last fifteen years, because previously, the universities were the decision-makers). This system, inspired by the model of the classic republican high school, aims to ensure high academic standards. But it is uncorrelated with the world of research for which it claims to prepare. CPGE teachers very rarely have a scientific activity or involvement in research laboratories, and the content taught, although rigorous, is more of an intensive lecture than an introduction to knowledge production. This structural compartmentalization produces a dead end: approximately 2024% of students from CPGE – or more than 13 young people per year – return to university, not as a matter of intellectual continuity, but as a fallback solution after being rejected from a school. This path, conceived as a "second chance", is paradoxically experienced as a failure, even though their results make them, in many disciplines, the main candidates capable of the agrégation and the top places of the CAPES (Certificate of Excellence for Professional Examinations), which they are increasingly abandoning due to their lack of sufficient attractiveness. Private schools and IEPs have created AP (parallel admissions) for about twenty years to plunder this pool of talent produced at great expense by public CPGE, which strips universities of their resources.

In short, the French system exposes a problematic dissociation: the producers of knowledge – the teacher-researchers, the authors of scientific publications – are at the university, but the elite courses supposed to prepare for this knowledge are managed from high schools and now by private higher education institutions and IEPs (which have also devalued competitive examinations and intensive work to attract the most brilliant baccalaureate holders without making them work, and therefore by the AP system to compensate for the lack of training of the former). This decoupling weakens the continuity between training and research, and contributes to the loss of legibility of the university model in the higher education ecosystem. Not to mention the loss of meaning for teacher-researchers who no longer know what the purpose of their teaching mission is.

The failure of mass professionalization

Despite regulatory efforts and the creation of programs such as professional licenses, cross-disciplinary skills courses, or integration modules, universities remain structurally incapable of meeting the needs of the productive sector. The relationship between teachers and students, the general nature of the content, and the lack of interface with local stakeholders drastically limit the impact of these programs. The university ecosystem also suffers from a lack of networks and mediation. Conversely, private institutions compensate for the relative weakness of their scientific supervision with a very pragmatic orientation toward the labor market: industrial partnerships, steering committees, individualized support, mock interviews, and professional interventions. Their ability to assess the real needs of the economic sector allows them to ensure a much higher integration rate. Career observatories like Syntec, which have become accustomed to working with small organizations better able to respond to their concerns about adaptation, are ignorant of the meaning of the terms "training." Conversely, more agile private organizations don't hesitate to adapt their course titles to the needs of the professions. Do we need a "media manager" to know how to organize a meeting? ESSEC immediately created a course: "meeting management," while LSHS programs continue to train "in research methodology."

A structural contradiction to be rethought

The current situation reflects a contradiction: public authorities bear the brunt of the training mission, without operational capacity or budgetary recognition commensurate with its responsibilities. In close collaboration with research organizations, it deploys knowledge at the cutting edge of international science, but without educational equivalent for the generation it welcomes. A rebalancing is necessary: ​​strengthening the links between research and training, restoring a clear professional purpose to university courses (but nothing will work without prior selection or the creation of refresher years – formerly propaedeutic –, since in the current state the function of the first university cycles consists, at great expense, of selecting among the baccalaureate holders the third or a quarter of those who are capable of obtaining a L3, which was formerly achieved by the lycée), and allowing a revaluation of the educational mission in public higher education. Without this, France risks creating a permanent gap between its scientific capacities and the effective training of its youth. Republican meritocracy, long achieved by universities, could well become a statistical illusion if we do not reinvest massively in this crucial link in the national education pact. France has already experienced a collapse in its ability to offer scientific patents, the annual number of which has fallen sixfold in just a few decades, a decline unknown among our competitors.