French University

I've been meaning to write about this since I started my Masters, but haven't had the time.

For anyone who hasn't studied or worked at a French public university, you probably don't realize how different things are from, well, let's just say normal ;-) universities (American, Canadian, British, etc).

I haven't had the widest experiences, having studied a year at the Fac des Lettres in Montpellier and now doing my Master 2 at the Fac des Sciences Sociales in Toulouse, but I think they're representative.

First off: French universities are very inexpensive to attend, by and large. If you compare them to American colleges (even public ones), French universities are free. Seriously. For registration, a year of health care, library access, most students will pay 300-400€. For an entire year.

In addition, the classic universities (not the Ecole de... or IUFM, or other Instituts) admit anyone who has the high school baccalaureat. That means that thousands and thousands of students flood the campuses every year, paying next to nothing. Education is considered a basic right and no one should be bared from it because of monetary concerns.

The government finances universities in a much larger way that in the States, so the budget is not tied to tuition. Businesses have to pay a "taxe d'apprentisage" which is basically a required donation to a university of their choice. The idea is that if they will pay their tax to a university or program in their field of work: the biochemical firm that pays the tax to the Biology department.

No meal plan or cost of lodging is included in the above price because there isn't the same "live on campus and have a campus community" idea/desire/feasibility. Here in Toulouse there are a handful of dorm rooms right next to the Sciences Sociales campus, but most students have some other kind of arrangement. I eat at the cafeteria most days because it's handy and right next to my classes but also because it's cheap: starter, main plate (meat with two sides) and desert is only 2€85. It's cafeteria food (with requisite mystery meat days) but you can't beat that price. Another benefit of governement subsidized student services.

Second: how the classes and programs are organized is inherently different from Angl0-Saxon universities.

Everything is prescribed and pre-decided and pre-planned: If you want to study Economics, you enroll in first year Economics and everyone in first year Economics has the exact same schedule. In the first few years students can pick electives, but for the most part everything is pre-organized.

With my Masters, I chose 0 classes, 0 electives, 0 seminars. We all have the exact same class schedule. The idea is that the people who organize the program schedule in a variety of classes. First year Economics will have a bit of English, an optional second language, and maybe a history class or sociology. You just can't choose whether you want the history class at 8:30, 2:30, Mondays or Thursdays. It's all decided for you.

The idea is that everyone progresses through the same intro, then intermediary, then advanced classes and everyone has acquired the same knowledge once they're done with the program. Standardization if you will. That has some merit, especially if employers want to know what people have studied with a particular degree.

This leads to the problem though that if you fail a class or two (or three or four) during the entire year, you don't get credit for the year. This is starting to change with the introduction of the credit system (in order to coordinate with other European universities), but it's still really common for students to do a particular year twice. To prevent this happening on too wide a scale, most programs have "do-overs" (ratrappage) on final exams. If you fail in May, you can take the test again in late August right before you reregister.

In the beginning of the year the cafeteria was filled to bursting at lunch time, and one of my classmates said "Don't worry, a lot of these students will drop out in a few months and it'll be a lot less crowded." And it's been true. Slowly since October there have been fewer and fewer students in the cafeteria. Part of the whole pre-designed program problem is that you start first year Economics and just hate it by December, you can't just drop a few classes and register for Art History for the spring semester. If you finish a year, you can transfer to a different program (as a girl in my Masters did a number of times; I think she did one year of Geography, another of History, and another of Litterature).

Third: lecture classes where you write down everything still exist.

An old family friend told me once that the differences between classes/teaching/learning in France and the States could be explained by a religious metaphore: France is Catholic, therefore what is important is what is said; America is Protestant, what is important is what is written.

I've found this to be extremely true. In America all courses and papers are centered around studying texts or other "primary sources". You read tons and tons before you go to class and then you debate what you've all read. In France there is "no" required reading (many professors recommend books at the beginning of the class, but it's more of a FYI list) and classes are mostly lecture. Questions are usually left for the end of a section or the class. It seems like the professors are doing 3/4 of the work for the students, but I've had many classes were the professors dictate summaries of books and theories and we all hurry to write it all down. In Montpellier I started reading a book the professor had recommended but I hadn't finished it by the time he got to discussing it about a month later. I quickly stopped reading it because he gave us the Cliff Notes version. Since there's no reading for homework, test questions are usually based on lecture content. I mentioned that when I was in the States I ordered a bunch of books on Communication/Mass Media because I wanted primary sources I could go back to (and also another perspective since my classes are very France centered. Nope, not even Europe centered. Just France)

There are of course a few exceptions. TD's (travaux dirigé, or labs) are often more intimate and professors may call on students and be more interactive.

I had a TD for my Masters where the professor encouraged discussions, but they never lasted long because students would start talking amongst themselves instead of in a classwide discussion. I was actually kind of shocked at how bad the French students were at having discussions/debates. It doesn't help that we're 35 and always seated in rows instead of a formation that would allow the maximum number of people see/face the others.

Since so much information has to be transfered through lectures, most French students spend a lot more time in class than American/Anglo students. There's much less homework, but lots more seat time. I have between 24 and 30 hours of class a week, compared to 12-15 hours my senior year in college. Again, since the programs are all pre-planned, these hours are all factored in and set for you.

Fourth: I keep saying pre-organized and pre-planned, but those are more like oxymorons for French universities.

Since tuition is practically nothing and the governement can only budget so much for universities, they're always under-staffed and in some state of disrepair. I wouldn't be doing this Master if I had to go into debt in order to finance it (like I would in the States), but the exchange is that the secretary for my program only works about 30 hours a week, and there's rarely any toilet paper in the bathrooms, and you can only check out 4 books from the library because they don't have a huge collection and there are so many students.... A lot of the superficial things American colleges really worry about because they're trying to impress the parents of prospective students (green grass, fresh paint..) and even less superficial (new computers in the library, beautiful dorms, state of the art performing arts center...) are just cut out due to the limited budget. The paint might be peeling from the walls, the library is far from being high-tech, there's only OpenOffice because they can't afford site-licenses.

The same family friend that told me the Catholic/Protestant metaphore said that at one of the Universities in Strasbourg she knew a secretary or assistant who was basically incompetant but who was kept on because they only had the budget for a 1/2 or 3/4 time position, and anyone who was competant wasn't going to accept that when they could find full time work elsewhere.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that the people organizing my Masters are incompetent, but their idea of "organizing" classes is to give us a different schedule every week. Schedules are available a month at a time, but usually only the 20th of the previous month. That means we have to wait till just a week and a half before the beginning of the new month to know our schedule. Not all programs or universities are like this, but I know that switching things around is fairly common.

In October when my classes started our "Directeur d'Etudes" said he had prepared a syllabus with explanations of the finals in March, but since it was an official document, it had to be approved by the University and he had only submitted it the week before classes started. We finally received it mid November.

In another classic French university moment, we kept asking and asking the secretary for the schedule for November, our second month of classes, and she said she couldn't email it because she didn't have the right to email all the students. We've since gotten around that hiccup by convincing her to send it to our class president, who then emails it out to everyone.

That, in a (large) nutshell, is a French university. My cultural bias still makes me think Anglo universities are better/more rigorous, but the French university is still good, just the result of a completely different logic.