What’s been happening in France? #Education
(please tell me if you like these long-ass posts or would prefer shorter ones with maybe links to articles, so the ones who are really interested can learn more)
A kind of movement has been going on for weeks here on social media: #EtudiantsSansMaster (#StudentsWithoutAMasters). It’s about students who just got their bachelor’s degree but will be unable to continue their studies next year, all because of the French system.
The number of students that go to college after high school has been steadily increasing over the past few years, but schools haven’t adapted by opening more spots, thus leading to a shortage of spots in universities. Long story short, the number of spots available in schools is FAR from enough, compared to the number of students who want to get into a Master’s program - it’s the same problem for kids that just graduated high school.
This results in a tough selection process. (Initially, this selection occurred between the first and second years of your Master’s degree. But I’m not delving into that either because I just spent 15 minutes trying to explain it concisely and I FAILED.)
The criteria are decided by each university, but they generally include: your motivation, previous studies (whether your previous major fits the program you apply for), grades, career goals, and sometimes your work/internship experience. The first phase of admission is submitting things like résumé, cover letter, and college grades certificates. Then they study your application and if their decision is favorable, you may have to go through an interview before they really decide to admit you or not (a variety of other processes exists too).
All this means that you’ve got to have a very good record for many programs: good grades, interesting and fitting experiences, and clear career goals (knowing what field you want to work in, what jobs interest you and what kind of missions these consist in). And more often than not, these standards are way too much! Not everyone is an excellent academic achiever, not everyone has had the same opportunities to get work experience or to travel abroad… But that’s another subject.
I’ll take my own example: I applied to about 10 programs. In my field, most of them had at most 30 spots. I graduated with honours, but had little work experience (one summer job and zero internships). A few months back, I decided I wanted to volunteer for a college association and I really think I would have been rejected from a lot more programs if this hadn’t been in my resume.
And many of my friends were rejected from the Master’s program of our OWN university, with the SAME major, because their level was “insufficient” or their studies “didn’t fit the program” (what could fit your program better than the bachelor’s degree that’s supposed to lead to it??). I was accepted into my very first choice only because I was able to show how huge my motivation was and I had done so much research. But many of my classmates are hard workers or had student jobs on the side, which meant they couldn’t dedicate all their time to college - does that mean they don’t deserve to get into a good program of their choice? Certainly not. This selection process is an open door to division by inequality.
Of course, if you’re applying to the most famous universities in the country, you’re expected to have an excellent record. But those students who haven’t been admitted anywhere are certainly not people who applied to La Sorbonne only, some of them applied to dozens of programs around the whole country and still received only negative answers. If you just look at the hashtag on Twitter, you’ll see how big a problem it is.
And the thing is, yeah, you can always try next year, but interrupting your studies for a year is clearly not ideal to a lot of people, for a lot of reasons. And if you really can’t get into any program any year, what the fuck are you gonna do with a bachelor’s degree? It’s generally admitted that for majors like mine, you gotta have a Master’s degree to even hope getting a good job since the bachelor’s degree is so theoretical and not nearly specialised enough.
I wish I could have made this shorter, but it’s a very important issue and I wanted to explain in a more simple manner than all the French articles you could find. Sorry for the length, as always haha!
