Opinion - News Analysis

A French experiment in affirmative action

Anita Joshua

France seems to have found a way to open up its elite educational institutions to the socially disadvantaged sections. There could be a lesson in this for India.

AT A time when Indian higher educational institutions are grappling with the issue of reserving seats for the Other Backward Classes, their counterparts — including elite institutes — in France are slowly but voluntarily signing up for the Priority Education Agreements (PEA) programme that facilitates the entry of students from economically depressed areas.

But it has not always been so. When one of France's most famous grandes écoles (premier institutes), the Institut d'etudes politiques de Paris, better known as Sciences Po, launched the PEA programme in 2001, recruiting high school students from disadvantaged areas to increase the social diversity of its student community, it not only courted controversy but even faced litigation. A French court has since upheld the constitutionality of the controversial affirmative action programme. By November 2006, four other higher educational institutions had taken their cue from Sciences Po.

Since 2001, about 1,500 such students had gone through the selection process for entry into Sciences Po. And 264 had made it, the numbers going up from 17 in the first year to 75 in 2006. The numbers are almost negligible in the Indian context but Sciences Po's experiment with the PEA is being cited as a successful example of positive discrimination, though critics insist it is just a publicity stunt aimed at changing the institute's white and elitist image.

Selection under the programme is not based on ethnicity or religion but on where the students live. Poor neighbourhoods have been targeted as Priority Education Areas mapped by the Government. All high schools in such localities get special treatment from the state, which spends 20 per cent of its budget on education.

Sciences Po, according to its vice-president Francis Verillaud, selected some high schools within these areas on the basis of the motivation and involvement of the teaching staff and management. In the first year, seven `difficult' secondary schools were picked in Paris' suburbs. Today, there are 33 partner schools and 15 are in the queue across the country. Four of the applicant schools are situated in overseas regions of France — two in French Guyana and two on the island of Martinique in the Caribbean.

Under the programme, teachers prepare school-leaving students especially for the competitive examination for Sciences Po; the only difference being that in their case it is an oral and not a written examination. The oral examination has been evolved on the premise that it is more equal. "The social and cultural differences play a more minor role in an oral examination than in a written test," said Mr. Verillaud. In France, a written test is not a multiple-choice examination but a long dissertation where presentation can be a decisive factor.

But Mr. Verillaud is quick to point out that the oral examination is equally competitive. To ensure that the oral examination does not compromise the quality of student intake, a special commission — comprising the Sciences Po president (vice-chancellor), a high-ranking civil servant, the chief executive officer of a leading private company, and a couple of senior academics — has been set up for the purpose. Over the five years the programme has been in place, the scores of PEA applicants have been comparable to others. The institute has worked out a differential fee structure that facilitates cross-subsidies and students can also avail themselves of the numerous scholarships on offer.

More importantly, claim advocates of the PEA programme, inspectors, school principals, and teachers have found a growing aspiration among targeted students for a grande école education, until recently the preserve of the French elite. At least they have stopped ruling themselves out, is the common refrain of PEA-favouring academics who insist that students from these areas rarely considered a grande école education.

And, points out Mr. Verillaud, Sciences Po — which has among its alumni leading lights of the country's political and diplomatic elite, including President Jacques Chirac and his predecessor Francois Mitterrand — remains a grande école. That prestige has not been diluted by the presence of students from the chronically underprivileged areas. "It has only made our classrooms more dynamic," says Mr. Verillaud. Half of those admitted since 2003 were children of people born outside France, among them two Indians.

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