Grandes Écoles

My university in the United States is by no means prestigious. It is not the most highly regarded in my state, nor does it top any national rankings. I'm still proud to say that it's a solid university, one that can offer a rigorous education to those students who seek it out. However, we all want the highest level of education we've achieved to be from the most esteemed institution. It makes little sense to attend an Ivy League university for undergraduate and move to a public state college to pursue one's graduate degree. Had I applied to graduate schools in the United States, I would have made a move designed to increase my upward mobility. The same logic applied when I made my decision to go to France, except the stakes were a bit higher.

My friends from SKEMA had impressed upon me over and over that without a sufficiently illustrious school on one's résumé, a student may have a very hard time finding a job or internship. I assumed that these difficulties would only be compounded by the fact that I was a foreigner with nowhere near a native level of French. It was therefore of paramount importance that I find a school whose name was worth my investment of a few years and a significant amount of euros. It's discouraging to reduce the significance of an education to just a name, but part of moving to France was learning to play by different rules.

Let's take a look at the playing field; this graph from L'Etudiant is a good place for us to start. It plots the "Academic Excellence" (Y-axis) of a given French business school against its "Recognition by Companies" (X-axis). As you can see, the upper-right corner contains the five schools which constitute the "Elite" category, three of which are SAI application members: HEC, ESCP Europe, EM Lyon (no longer ordered alphabetically, but by prestige). ESSEC and EDHEC, the final two schools to round out the "Elite", unfortunately choose not to participate in the SAI application, as convenient as it would be for us to apply to all five of the "Elite" schools at once. Instead, the two remaining SAI application members, Audencia Nantes and SKEMA, find themselves near the top of the next cluster of schools, the "Not-to-be-missed" (a slightly awkward translation from "Les Incontournables").

At the risk of sounding as pretentious as the French recruiters who perpetuate this outmoded pecking order, I would have to admit that had I been only accepted at Audencia or SKEMA, I would probably have given them a miss. This is certainly not to say that there's anything wrong with either of these schools, au contraire. However, I thought that as I'd already be fighting against an innate disadvantage, I needed to submit to the inevitability of name-dropping and place myself as high up the food chain as I could manage.

Business schools only tell us a little less than half the story of les grandes écoles. Les grandes écoles are not quite universities. With exceptions in fields such as law and medicine, the universities in France are essentially open to the general public, lacking such crude trappings as tuition or entrance standards. They teach all manner of the humanities and sciences (soft and hard). Les grandes écoles exist as counterparties to the universities, principally in the fields of engineering and management. Admission is usually dependent upon completion of two years of grueling classes préparatoires and equally arduous entrance examinations.

A foreigner accepted into any of the five schools that participate in the SAI can rightfully say that they have entered the ranks of les grandes écoles, but we'll see later on that this alone doesn't give us quite the same claim to bragging rights as those who have gone through the French selection process.