Grandes Écoles students are correlated with higher social classes, but that's due to socio-cultural background, family discipline, ability to dedicate to 100% to syudying without taking a student job, etc. more than anything else. Admission are purely on anonymous competitive exams, and no amount of money will get you there if you suck at them.
Foreign students are something else though.
Ah, the typical French delusion that entrance exams make Grandes Ecoles admission somewhat fair.
The fact is that most of the students who succeed at these entrance exams and land position in the most successful of Grandes Ecoles come from the same highschools. These highschools all happen to be in Paris or Lyon and due to how the French system works, your family has to live in one of these very affluent and costly neighborhood for you to attend. Amusingly, practices which are mercilessly squashed by the administration in most highschools throughout the country like skill-based sorting of students or going at a faster pace that the official curriculum are tolerated in these few highschools. I let guessing where our elected politicians put their children as an exercise for the reader.
As usual in France, there is one rule for the plebeian and another one for the ruling class.
As I mentioned, it's highly correlated with students socio-economical status; now at least it's not conditioned on your grandparents stuffing an Ivy League with money, with your parents having time and money to send you on tons of extra-curricular, your family having been at Eton for centuries, or your father being an oligarch and sending you to Switzerland at 18 y.o.
You can spit on and scorn us and our system all you want (it's quite in fashion on the Internet, I'm sure you'll get a lot of upvotes for it), but at least it tries; and in my experience, it's the best one with the ex-soviet ones to balance high quality education with meritocracy.
> As usual in France, there is one rule for the plebeian and another one for the ruling class.
Sure, that's so typically French. It's true that Eton, Princeton and Beijing University frequently display students coming from the most remote and poorer part of their country.
Sure and I went to ESSEC after doing my prépa in Tours and grewing up in the countryside. Guess where did 95% of my classmates came from. The plural of anecdata, something, something…
The system is utter garbage as was pointed by Bourdieux decades ago. It’s not even cheap which could have been its sole redeeming quality. Social mobility indicators in France are even worse than in the UK, a case study of what not to do.
Then you got shafted. It's a couple of hundred euros per year when you're on a stipend.
> The system is utter garbage as was pointed by Bourdieux decades ago
And what did Bourdieux propose?
I was talking about what it costs to the state. You do realise it’s heavily subsidised, don’t you?
BTW, what did Bourdieux propose?
Bourdieu didn’t need to propose anything. He proved data in hand that the system was unfair. A quick look at the current situation of France should tell you all you need to know about how effective the system actually is.
But finding ideas is not that hard. We could just get our heads out of our asses and copy what’s done in a country having better results. Spoiler alert, the answer is not a system generalising the structure of military schools to whole areas of higher educations put in place by a military dictatorship to curb the emergence of dissenting elites in the university system. It still baffle me that this has to be pointed to the average French. This country really deserves what it has become.
La crtitique est aisée, l'art est difficile.
> We could just get our heads out of our asses and copy what’s done in a country having better results.
Id est? The US system, where you can get a pass into an Ivy league if your granddaddy paid enough money, the Chinese system where any exam can be skipped with a few millions yuans, or the Russian system where the children are taken from their families at 12y.o.?