French students shy of real world

BBC reports:

Montpellier is very much a young person's city. Students make up 30% of its population, and the pavement cafes are swarming with youngsters who are furiously scribbling in note books or dashing off the final lines of essays.

But despite the nationwide passion for education, surprisingly, not a single French university makes it into the world's top 40.

France may be a global leader in high technology, but employers complain that today there are far too few students studying science and technology and there are far too many studying "soft subjects" which leaves them ill-prepared to join the real world of work.

At Montpellier's Social Science faculty, I watched scores of undergraduates soak up a lecture on basic psychology.


There are 65,000 psychology students in France - that is a quarter of the European total for that subject.

I asked a passing student what he wanted to do when he left university. "I want to be an eternal student, " he said. "Just learning for learning's sake."

The foundation of the welfare state is statist education.