There’s a lot to see here. You can see what sociologists call the “second massification” of the universities, a period of major growth from something like 1985-1995. Almost every discipline is rising. The largest disciplines are not, actually, the ones with the most growth. That dubious honor goes to the field called STAPS, which stands for Sciences et Techniques des Activités Physiques et Sportives, which we could translate loosely as Athletic Sciences. STAPS grew from 10,947 enrolled students in 1979 to 41553 in 2005 — a 3.8-fold increase! The similarly tiny fields of dentistry (odontologie) and pharmacy, on the other hand, actually shrunk, though you can barely see them because they get lost in the bottom of the graph.

Let’s look more closely at the major disciplines. Letters and human sciences here are labeled lettres; they’d probably be called humanities and social sciences in the U.S. Anyway, it’s striking that they constitute the largest sector of French higher education, with around half a million enrollees. They have almost doubled in size since the 1980s, though they have also been in a steady, slow absolute decline since the mid-nineties. The sciences are smaller, but show a similar trend. The business-oriented disciplines of Eco (here short for Sciences Economiques) and Admin (Administration économique et sociale) have grown somewhat more, by a factor of 2.7, and seem to have on the whole one of the most consistent, steady rises of any field. Law (droit), which presumably leads to both private and public-sector careers but at any rate to a secure professional identity, has grown somewhat and leveled off, while its cousin medicine has on the whole slightly declined. (Law and medicine are the two most traditional professional fields in the traditional French university.)

To get a better sense of the changing demographic composition of these enrollments, it’s helpful to look at a chart that shows each discipline’s proportional share of university students:

The wider the band, the larger a discipline’s share of the university’s student body… Here you can see that medicine and pharmacy have greatly declined, leaving space for every other field to broaden. In terms of absolute numbers, mind you, medicine and pharmacy are about where they were, 140,000ish in medicine and 30,000ish in pharmacy; but as a share of the university as a whole, they are dwindling.

Something that really strikes me, looking at this diagram, is that letters and human sciences are not even in a state of proportional decline within the university system. In fact they have grown a bit. Of course, if we look further at the internal distributions within the human sciences, we’ll find that the growth is preferentially concentrated in new vocationally-oriented disciplines (educational sciences, for example). I’ll look at that in a future post. But it’s striking to see growth in these fields, which are the exact ones not considered “future-oriented” by contemporary “knowledge society” policymakers.

For another point of comparison, it’s helpful to look at the disciplinary distribution of degrees actually awarded:

The magnitude of these figures is much lower, three times lower or so; that’s unsurprising since we can assume that it takes a few years of enrollment for students to get a degree, and some drop out along the way. (This graph, unfortunately, lacks the medical fields listed on the other one.) Anyway, the basic distribution is similar, with letters and human sciences at the top, sciences above that, and then law and econ. I note that the “peak” in letters and sciences is a year or two later on this graph – 1998 instead of 1995. Needless to say, that’s what we would expect and want to see, since that indicates that, indeed, a couple of years separate the entrance of a big group of students from the time when this group gets its degrees. (I’m also struck, in passing, by the fact that law and econ/admin track each other much more closely on this graph than on the other one; I don’t have a good explanation for that right now.)

To really understand what’s going on in French higher ed, however, we have to look at the place of the university system within the broader higher educational landscape, which has a million kinds of technical schools, private schools, art and architecture schools, specialized teacher training institutes (now being demolished or integrated into the universities, depending on your point of view), and the like. The first thing to do is see how much of the total higher ed world is encompassed by the public university system we’ve been looking at:

As you can see, the public universities continue to serve the vast majority of university students. (Note that the “University Technical Institutes” mentioned here are actually part of the universities, and are included in their total size; the blue line just indicates a subsection of the population tracked by the green line.) Nonetheless, university enrollments are in what looks like a slow decline, while other higher educational institutes are slowly rising. (I actually don’t know what explains the sudden dip in “Other Higher Ed” in 2008 and the slight rise in the universities; there could be some organizational restructuring that would account for it.)

Now, to get a clearer idea of what people across the French higher ed system are studying, we can consider a graph that shows changing proportions of total enrollments across different university and non-university sectors:

The bottom segments designate the university fields we looked at earlier – letters, sciences, economics/administration, law. The top segments designate different fields from the non-university world — tech schools, teacher training, art and architecture and social services, pure management schools (I should probably have just labeled them “business schools”; they’re mostly private schools), the tiny private university sector, etc. I did make one mistake here, actually, which was to lump all health-related fields together; this means that medicine, a university field, is put together with paramedical training, which are taught elsewhere. This does help us to see that health fields as a whole are rather large, even if medicine itself isn’t growing much (as indicated above).

One thing that this chart shows us very clearly is that, looking at the system as a whole, the letters, human sciences, and sciences are in relative decline. Of course as a matter of absolute numbers, almost everything has grown, as we saw above. But the major relative growth here seems to be in tech schools, maybe in some aspects of health sciences, in engineering, in management. That doesn’t mean these fields are demographically dominant; they’re not. But their share of the students is rising.

In future posts on these demographic issues, which I’m only just beginning to really understand, I want to look at the changing class composition of university students; I want to look at the changing makeup of the disciplines within letters and human sciences; and I’d like to compare the progress of vocationally-oriented higher ed with its status in the U.S. Are business schools proportionally bigger in the U.S. than in France, for example? That would be my guess.

p.s. — if you have ideas on how to make the presentation of these necessarily abstract demographic questions any more, well, exciting, I am actively interested in that!

As you can see, Paris is still by far the biggest university town. If we look at the accompanying figures for 2007-8, it turns out that Paris proper has 156,743 university students, with 320,942 total in the Paris region (Ile-de-France). After that, we have Lyon (73,262), Lille (58,788), Toulouse (57,907), Aix/Marseille (56,590), Bordeaux (53,335), Montpellier (43,355), Strasbourg (37,299), Rennes (37,008), Grenoble (32,978), Nancy (28,078), Nantes (26,329), Nice (21,664), and from there on down… As in the last post on centralization, here too, mapping by student population size, we can see that the Parisian region remains by far the largest university site — its 320,942 of 1,225,643 total public university students comes out to 26% of the nation’s university population. (Note that universities only constitute about half–56%–of the French higher ed population, but we’ll talk about the rest of them some other time.)

But our thinking about centralization has to shift when we find out that, over time, provincial universities have grown and thus diminished Paris’s relative standing. In other words, it seems that historically, Paris used to be even more the center of the academic universe than it is now. To better understand this process let’s look at a thumbnail sketch of French university massification by a sociologist I know here, Charles Soulié:

Dit de manière extrêmement schématique et en si on se base sur l’évolution du nombre d’enseignants titulaires dans chaque faculté, discipline, on observe que la 1er massification, celle des années 1960 donc, sera à l’origine d’un développement sans précédent des disciplines de lettres et sciences humaines, tandis que la part relative des facultés de sciences, et médecine, baissera considérablement. Plus précisément en lettres et sciences humaines, la progression sera notamment le fait des nouvelles disciplines de sciences humaines sociales (psychologie, sociologie, etc.).

Put very schematically and looking at the evolution of the number of teaching appointments in each faculty and discipline, one sees that the first massification, that of the 1960s, originated an unprecedented development of letters and human sciences; while at the same time the relative fraction of the science and medicine faculties was considerably diminished. More precisely, in letters and human sciences, growth occurred primarily in the new social and human sciences (psychology, sociology, etc).

La seconde massification verra l’explosion des IUT, universités de proximité, antennes universitaires diverses, la part de Paris et de la région parisienne diminuant considérablement dans le potentiel national à la faveur d’un processus de régionalisation croissant de l’enseignement supérieur. Concernant les disciplines, elle s’accompagnera d’un développement très important de la faculté de droit sciences économiques, les lettres et sciences humaines, et surtout les sciences dures, connaissant une augmentation inférieure à la moyenne, tandis qu’en raison du numerus clausus la part relative des enseignants des disciplines médicales diminuera considérablement.

The second massification saw the explosion of IUTs (University Technical Institutes), local universities, and off-campus university branches; the relative size of Paris and of the Parisian region fell considerably in the face of a process of growing regionalization in higher education. This was accompanied by major growth in the faculty of law and economic sciences, while letters and human sciences, and especially the hard sciences, grew less than average. The medical disciplines, because of the fixed limits on their admissions, saw the relative size of their teaching faculty considerably diminished.

I’m not an expert like Soulié on what he would call changing disciplinary morphology — that is, the changes in proportional sizes of the disciplines. But the gist here, which is supported by various other publications I’ve come across, is that the “new” social sciences grew in the 60s, while now it’s the more vocational fields (business, economics, etc) which are the major growth fields. And if it’s true that, as Soulié says, the most recent university expansion goes hand in hand with university regionalization, then we might reasonably expect that Paris, the more traditional academic capital, would remain more dominant in older fields like “letters, languages and human sciences.” As is, to judge by this map of letters and human sciences enrollments, indeed the case:

It’s obvious from visual inspection that the relative size of Paris is much larger here than in the other diagram. I couldn’t easily find the exact figures for each city, but the key (which I had to crop) suggests that Paris has 120,000, while the other large dots are only a few tens of thousands. In other words, it does seem to be the case that the most traditional subjects (the humanities and social sciences) are particularly Paris-centered.

Indeed, if we look at the distribution of doctoral enrollments, we can see that Paris is, if anything, even more overwhelmingly dominant:

Here Paris is represented by a dot that means 20,000, while the other dots are probably one or two thousand and less. In other words, even if university education has been spread around the country, the reproduction of the disciplines, of the professoriate, of the academic “corps” remains almost exclusively a Parisian concern.

Unfortunately, I’ve yet to find data about the changing rates of Parisian (demographic) dominance narrowed down by discipline and degree level. But I think we can assume that some disciplines are less centralized than others, and that the degrees of Parisian centralization have shifted at different rates depending on the disciplines. I’ll try to track that down. In the meantime, it’s interesting to reflect on the curious interrelations we see here between ongoing Parisian dominance and growing but only relative decentralization. It’s as if there’s decentralization, but only according to a pre-existing spatial hierarchy. Ongoing centralization and gradual decentralization at once. Which should be no surprise to readers of David Harvey on contradictory spatial processes…