A puzzling trend in French engineer school students is to contest the role of companies in their training or even the very training towards an engineering job, as illustrated by the above Le Monde article of last weekend. A former Polytechnique student has even published a book entitled Désertons, calling for deserting the job market. (Paradoxically on sale on Amazon!) These schools are indeed a French peculiarity in that they were initially created to train civil servants for the French State and later expanded to larger cohorts free to join public or private companies. They are radically distinct (and independent) from universities, in their entry mechanism (with a specific competition exam, requiring its own specific preparation public programme), in their training, and in their funding (three times higher per student and mostly issued from other ministries than the Ministry of Education, with minute fees if any). The State support extend to paying a salary to Polytechnique students during their studies, which should on principle be reimbursed when the students do not join a civil service or a public company although it is unclear if anyone has yet been asked to since 2000. (Not due to the 2000 bug!) I thus fail to get the logic of this contestation when the professional purpose of these schools is clear to everyone, when there exist alternatives in the (public) university system, and when the French State is supporting much more intensively this branch of the education system…
