carried by the demography and the needs of companies, more expensive to students than public schools and yet in great demand, private engineering schools cut the lion’s share.
By Eric Nunès
They move, push the walls, grab square meters wherever it is possible to run their educational machinery at full speed. In France, 200 schools produce engineers who will have to operate the national economy and its industry. In 2012, the Conference of Directors of French Engineering Schools (CDEFI) set a goal: to meet demand, it was necessary, each year, graduating 40,000 new engineers, against 33,000 until then. Eight years later, the objective is widely exceeded: according to 2022 report of the CDEFI, they were more than 44,000 in 2020.
Public schools responded to demand by increasing their workforce by 13 % between 2016 and 2021. With 57 % of graduate students, they still form the majority of engineers in France. But it was the private (and paid) establishments that have seized the lion from the lion, their workforce recording a jump of 37 % over the same period. And the market continues its growth: “It would always be necessary to train 10,000 more to meet demand”, estimates Jean-Michel Nicolle, vice-president of the CDEFI and director of the EPF school.
The strong French birth rate recorded between 2000 and 2015 provides for several years still an increasing flow of tens of thousands of high school students at the gates of these schools. “A new student for a private school is additional resources; in the public, it is a cost,” sums up François Stephan, director general of ECE (private school). In an opinion presented on behalf of the Commission for Cultural Affairs and Education on the 2023 finance bill, the deputy Hendrik Davi La France insoumise stresses that the annual expenditure, for the State, for a student engineer, Mounts at 18,482 euros, while tuition fees culminate at 3,000 euros per year in the establishments of the Ministry of Higher Education. To the State, although impact, to subsidize the difference.
Private higher education establishments of general interest (eespig) are free to apply much higher amounts, varying between 7,500 euros and more than 10,000 euros annually. They can also increase their income by creating training dearly invoiced to students, such as Bachelors or Masters of Science, or “by increasing the size of establishments to amortize and optimize the cost of a student”, decrypts Jean- Michel Nicolle. So many opportunities that escape the public sector.
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