I come out of a top 5 Grande École after having done my classes préparatoires in the highly famous high school of Boulogne s/s Mer and stemming from a family a tad above poverty; so I know a little bit what I'm talking about.
As I mentioned, it's highly correlated with students socio-economical status; now at least it's not conditioned on your grandparents stuffing an Ivy League with money, with your parents having time and money to send you on tons of extra-curricular, your family having been at Eton for centuries, or your father being an oligarch and sending you to Switzerland at 18 y.o.
You can spit on and scorn us and our system all you want (it's quite in fashion on the Internet, I'm sure you'll get a lot of upvotes for it), but at least it tries; and in my experience, it's the best one with the ex-soviet ones to balance high quality education with meritocracy.
> As usual in France, there is one rule for the plebeian and another one for the ruling class.
Sure, that's so typically French. It's true that Eton, Princeton and Beijing University frequently display students coming from the most remote and poorer part of their country.
> I come out of a top 5 Grande École after having done my classes préparatoires in the highly famous high school of Boulogne s/s Mer
Sure and I went to ESSEC after doing my prépa in Tours and grewing up in the countryside. Guess where did 95% of my classmates came from. The plural of anecdata, something, something…
The system is utter garbage as was pointed by Bourdieux decades ago. It’s not even cheap which could have been its sole redeeming quality. Social mobility indicators in France are even worse than in the UK, a case study of what not to do.
The issue is not that it’s heavily subsidised. It’s that it has piss poor results for what it costs the French public compared to what’s done by others.
Bourdieu didn’t need to propose anything. He proved data in hand that the system was unfair. A quick look at the current situation of France should tell you all you need to know about how effective the system actually is.
But finding ideas is not that hard. We could just get our heads out of our asses and copy what’s done in a country having better results. Spoiler alert, the answer is not a system generalising the structure of military schools to whole areas of higher educations put in place by a military dictatorship to curb the emergence of dissenting elites in the university system. It still baffle me that this has to be pointed to the average French. This country really deserves what it has become.
> Bourdieu didn’t need to propose anything. He proved data in hand that the system was unfair.
La crtitique est aisée, l'art est difficile.
> We could just get our heads out of our asses and copy what’s done in a country having better results.
Id est? The US system, where you can get a pass into an Ivy league if your granddaddy paid enough money, the Chinese system where any exam can be skipped with a few millions yuans, or the Russian system where the children are taken from their families at 12y.o.?
As I mentioned, it's highly correlated with students socio-economical status; now at least it's not conditioned on your grandparents stuffing an Ivy League with money, with your parents having time and money to send you on tons of extra-curricular, your family having been at Eton for centuries, or your father being an oligarch and sending you to Switzerland at 18 y.o.
You can spit on and scorn us and our system all you want (it's quite in fashion on the Internet, I'm sure you'll get a lot of upvotes for it), but at least it tries; and in my experience, it's the best one with the ex-soviet ones to balance high quality education with meritocracy.
> As usual in France, there is one rule for the plebeian and another one for the ruling class.
Sure, that's so typically French. It's true that Eton, Princeton and Beijing University frequently display students coming from the most remote and poorer part of their country.