French Universities Accused of Manipulating Foreign Student Application Data

According to Mediapart, the two professors from the Elie Cartan Institute of Lorraine in Nancy, claim in a letter sent to the research professors of the University, that this manipulation aims to "prove stability in the number of applications at the local level of each university, to show that the increase in registration fees does not drive away extra-community students".

Following the "Studies in France" procedure, students had to submit their application by checking three choices of universities, which would be processed in stages, following an elimination process. This step-by-step method has been replaced by the simultaneous processing of the candidate’s file by the three chosen universities.

The two professors believe that "this obviously has the consequence of tripling the number of initial requests and incidentally overloading the admissions commissions, which will be required to rule on virtual requests. As a result, the ministry can thus, in the most complete contempt of any intellectual honesty, display a rising national statistic and de facto justify its policy of increasing tuition fees".

According to the director of the French Institute in Morocco, quoted by Hespress, the impact of the increase in Campus France fees on the number of Moroccan applicants will only be revealed at the end of the registration process, adding that "the French government of course expects a drop in the number of applicants", and adding that "the most relevant figures to analyze the impact of the reform will be obtained at the end of the process, on the number of students actually selected by the universities and having joined their faculty at the start of the academic year".