France’s private sector quality label plan met with scepticism

France’s private higher education sector is going through a growth spurt, but the government’s plan to add another label to a crowded market might not help students or rein in the cowboys, according to veterans.

Education minister Sylvie Retailleau opened the academic year by announcing that the government would introduce a “quality label” from next year, with private providers judged on the time they spend on student support, the stability of their governance and their transparency on admissions and registration fees, among other things.

Existing regulation has been found wanting. In December 2022 a government probe of private colleges certified and labelled to teach state-regulated diplomas found 40 per cent had “abusive or illegal” clauses in their agreements with students and around a third had “deceptive commercial practices”.

The size and diversity of France’s tertiary private sector – which includes thousands of young, for-profit colleges and prep schools specialising in single professions, alongside non-profit grandes écoles with global prestige – means judging quality and making comparisons is trickier than elsewhere.

Sébastien Vivier-Lirimont, founder of the higher education consultancy Headway Advisory, told Times Higher Education that navigating the dizzying selection using esoteric certifications alone was like being a novice wine shopper. “It’s considered a kind of reassurance, but nobody understands anything about that on the families’ side, so there is a huge effort of clarification to make first,” he said.

Rather than another binary seal of approval based on the government’s “vague” and hard-to-quantify indicators, which include the acquisition of transversal skills, he said, more institutions should be obliged to report the employability figures that matter for vocational trainees: access to jobs, graduation rates and average salaries.

The data-sharing approach is also favoured by Julien Jacqmin, an associate professor of economics at NEOMA Business School, a grande école, who has called for a comparison tool covering all higher education, akin to the US’ College Scorecard, which since 2015 has allowed prospective students to compare any institution, albeit using patchy data and what some have said is a confusing interface.

Dr Jacqmin said there were limitations to importing the US approach, because it would be unfair to draw direct parallels between France’s private institutions and public universities, not least because the latter are forbidden from selecting which students they admit.

Others argue that regulating institutions based on how they are funded is the wrong approach, including Martin Hirsch, an influential former civil servant and executive vice-president of Galileo Global Education, a Paris-based for-profit provider with a portfolio of institutional brands spread over 91 campuses.

For him, regulation should cover all professional programmes. In April, Galileo said the authorities should evaluate private schools’ research performance, require employability statistics to be published and make teacher recruitment more stringent, although still amenable to the rotation of fresh industry expertise.

He and Dr Vivier-Lirimont said collecting basic employability data should be easy, with enrolment centralised through the Parcoursup platform and alumni employment data pulled from the social security system.

At the same time, Dr Jacqmin said, the ministry’s current indicator list and label, which institutions would have to apply and pay for, could be vulnerable to gaming by unscrupulous institutions and would take years to set up. In the shorter term, he said, officials should tackle bad providers by putting a cap on the amount of public funding for-profit providers can get through apprentice training allowances and enable those who drop out in the first few weeks to get refunds on their fees.

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com