Terminals and young people in reorientation only have a few hours left to express their wishes on the higher education admission platform. After four years of existence, it continues to divide, including in the speeches of presidential candidates.
A little more reflection and stress for senior students and reorientation students. They have until Tuesday midnight to express their wishes on Parcoursup, the higher education admissions platform. It is 10 wishes maximum and 20 sub-vows among all the formations recognized by the State, which they must deposit, without having to classify them. However, they have until April 7 to refine their cover letters and application files.
Each year, the academic destiny of hundreds of thousands of high school students and other young people in reorientation depends on Parcoursup. At the end of its 2021 edition, 590,000 of the 635,000 baccalaureate holders participating in the procedure received at least one admission proposal, but this does not necessarily mean that it corresponded to their first choice. In addition, several thousand candidates have either completely left the platform to follow parallel post-baccalaureate admission routes, or seized a commission for access to higher education (Caes) for lack of a satisfactory admission proposal.
This year, the first answers will be sent to candidates from June 2, and until September. This duration is part of the criticisms of the unions and specialists in the subject against this post-baccalaureate admission platform created four years ago. “It is a procedure which is spread over several months and which creates a certain number of difficulties”, especially “for students who do not have the possibility of waiting until the summer to decide”, emphasizes Julien Grenet, research director at the CNRS and co-author of an INSEE study on Parcoursup.
“Overbooking”
While many recognize progress compared to APB – in particular the end of the draw, the creation of scholarship quotas or information on the training provided by the platform -, for Hervé Christofol, member of the national office of the Snesup-FSU union, “we must abandon the non-classification of wishes, which has created a real tension in training, and has resulted in overbooking”. According to him, it should “create new places to remove the selection”.
Courses that have more candidates than places offered rank according to the file. Students “wonder how they were ratedthere is a strong feeling of injustice”says Alban Mizzi, doctoral student in sociology and Parcoursup specialist. “The procedure is long, stressful, opaque”.
Presidential candidates castigate it, several on the left proposing to delete it. “I will repeal Parcoursup, this ignominy”, launched the radical left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon on Twitter in early March. A few months earlier, he had mentioned a “vocation breaker”. Communist candidate Fabien Roussel, who also wants “end it”described Parcoursup as “Koh Lanta of career guidance, but without immunity totem”.
Anne Hidalgo also wants to see this platform disappear, “to restore equitable access for French high school students to higher education”just like the ecologist Yannick Jadot, for whom “this black box system that defines your future is unbearable”. For “avoiding insider trading in orientation”, the right-wing candidate Valérie Pécresse affirms for her part that she “will also make Parcoursup’s local algorithms transparent and accessible”.
Emmanuel Macron himself praised the “tremendous success” by Parcoursup, with “better results” than the much criticized previous Admission Post-Bac (APB) system. He added, however, that it is necessary “continue the work to improve the orientation initiated” the platform.