Claire Lundberg explores the ups and downs of the country’s state-subsidized university system. Among the downs:
[A]t France’s open-enrollment public universities, the dropout and failure rate after the first year is close to 50 percent. The most competitive majors, such as law and medicine, cull their student lists with more brutal testing. Future French doctors must pass a government-regulated subject test after their first year of college—a test for which the initial failure rate is 90 percent. Many students take the entire year a second time, but even these redoublants have an 80 percent failure rate. (The French minister of education is trying to implement reforms that redirect the weakest students into other professions after their first semester.)
People who want to be doctors or lawyers often retake the first year several times, in hopes of passage—each time, costing the government more money.
The Ministry of Education would like to limit the number of times these tests can be taken. In a way, this makes sense—the government is paying to train the doctors, they want to make the decisions about who will and won’t progress in the profession. But of course, there are other skills that go into being a doctor besides the ability to pass a government exam. The French system works beautifully if you’re extremely focused from a very early age, work well under pressure, and are great at taking tests. It works less well if you’re not sure at age 16 exactly what you might want to do with your life, or if your family members and peers aren’t already familiar with the system.
The Dish 