What began last month as a protest over unfilled teaching positions at Lycée Saint-Exupéry in a working-class suburb of Paris has spread across France.
Hundreds of thousands of students are protesting crowded classrooms, unfilled teaching posts, and crumbling buildings. Thursday marked the 10th day of protests.
Another target has emerged on placards and in chants: Parcoursup, France’s central online portal for higher-education applications.
Three French students told Business Insider that the admissions system can turn underprivileged schooling, personal upheaval, and a shortage of local courses into barriers to higher education.
“There is no social justice,” Pierre Sourzat, a 17-year-old student in a preparatory program in Toulouse and president of the association “Les Lycéens,” told Business Insider. “That’s why high-school students are angry today.”
On Thursday, in response to the protests, the minister of national education introduced an emergency plan to address students’ concerns, including a plan to mobilize substitute teachers.
What is Parcoursup?
Parcoursup is France’s state-run, centralized website for applying to university and other post-high-school courses.
The French government introduced Parcoursup in 2018 with the goal of making access to higher education fairer and more transparent than the previous system had.
The Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation runs the platform. About 900,000 people use it each year to apply for first-year university courses, preparatory classes, and other higher-education programs.
Most French high-school seniors seeking a first-year place use Parcoursup. Some programs, including certain live-performing-arts courses and those not listed on the portal, accept applications directly.
Students in their final year of high school submit up to 10 choices on Parcoursup for specific university courses, preparatory classes, or other postsecondary programs they want to attend. Individual programs publish their admissions criteria and use committees — largely made up of teachers — to assess and rank applicants. Parcoursup then makes offers in that order.
The government says the website is not a black-box algorithm deciding students’ futures.
But students say the criteria, and the weight given to grades, teacher assessments, personal statements, and other factors, can vary by course — leaving them with a process that can feel opaque.
The Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
What do students say the issues are?
Sourzat said the portal is useful as a centralized way to find and apply for courses. But he said it makes students compete on academic records built in unequal school conditions.
“We don’t choose our high schools. We go to the one in the area where we live,” he said. “And then, when we apply through Parcoursup, we’re treated as though we’re all equal.”
Sourzat said he attended a rural high school north of Toulouse and went roughly a third of one school year without a French teacher before sitting the French baccalaureate exam. That score, in part, determines whether students can access all programs and universities.
A 2021 study by researchers at Insee, France’s national statistics office, and the Paris School of Economics found that, in popular courses with more applicants than places, Parcoursup allowed programs to rely more heavily on academic records to pick candidates.
In the Paris region, students with stronger records were more likely to enter the most competitive courses, while those with weaker records were more often directed elsewhere, the study found.
Ryad Rani, the 19-year-old president of the “Union Syndicale Lycéenne,” a French high school union, called Parcoursup a “machine of social selection.”
After his mother died in January, Rani said he faced eviction from their social housing and missed more than three months of his final year of high school.
“You’re burying your mother and filling in your choices,” he said. “That is the last thing on your mind — but you’re put under pressure to do it.”
Ilies Djaouti, a 24-year-old second-year master’s student at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, said the shortage of local courses can also push students to leave home — even when they don’t have the means.
Djaouti said he was able to move to Paris only because of CROUS, France’s public student-support network, which provides subsidized housing and financial aid.
“I had to choose programs at the other end of France,” said Djaouti, who applied from Narbonne, in southern France. “Without CROUS, I would not have been able to live or study.”
Miguel MEDINA / AFP via Getty Images
What happens now?
On Wednesday, the government announced a 5-point plan to address some of the issues being raised in the protests. Those include teacher absences, issues with facilities, and the transparency of higher-education admissions.
The government has also opened an online consultation inviting high-school students to share their concerns and proposals. The portal, which runs until October 23, has attracted more than 68,000 participants as of Friday; the ministry says it will publish the results by the end of the month.
For Parcoursup’s 2027 admissions cycle, the government says applicants will be better able to understand the criteria programs use, how heavily they weigh grades and subject choices, how files are ranked, and why they receive a given response.
Speaking to lawmakers on Wednesday, Education Minister Édouard Geffray rejected calls to abolish Parcoursup. He acknowledged that the platform had “crystallised” students’ anxieties about higher education and said the government would bring forward proposals for improvement by October 20.
Protests were still underway on Friday, with new school blockades and student gatherings reported in cities including Paris and Lyon, a day after tens of thousands marched nationwide.
