The Low Quality of French Universities

The New York Times reports:

There are 32,000 students at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris, but no student center, no bookstore, no yearbook, no student-run newspaper, no sports stadium, no freshman orientation, no corporate recruiting system.

The 480,000-volume central library is open only 10 hours a day, closed on Sundays and holidays. Only thirty of the library's 100 computers have Internet access.

The campus cafeterias close after lunch. Professors often do not have office hours; many do not have offices. Some classrooms are so overcrowded that at exam time, many students have to find seats elsewhere. By late afternoon every day, the campus is largely empty.

Sandwiched between a prison and an unemployment office just outside of Paris, the university here is neither the best nor the worst place to study in this fairly wealthy country.

Rather, it reflects the crisis of France's archaic state-owned university system: overcrowded, underfunded, disorganized and resistant to the changes demanded by the outside world.

Statist education today.Just think, Left-wing America says we should be more like France.