One point evoked by other comments, which I’ve realized only after leaving France and living in the UK, is that there is still a massive prestige for engineering. ENS is not technically an engineering school, but it benefits from this prestige by being lumped with them, and by being accessed mainly from the national contests at the end of Prepas.
As always with these kind of cultural phenomena, I didn’t really notice them until I left France for the UK. There is a sense in France (more when I was a student, but still there) that the most prestigious jobs are engineering ones. Going to engineering school is considered one of the top options (with medecine), and it is considered a given that any good student with a knack for maths, physics, science, will go to prepa and engineering school.[1] It’s almost free (and in practice is free if your parents don’t make more than a certain amount), and it is guaranteed to lead to a good future.
This means that the vast majority of mathematical talent studies the equivalent of a undergraduate degree in maths, compressed in the span of 2 years. In addition of giving the standard french engineer much more of a mathematical training, it shows to the potential mathematicians, by default, a lot of what they could do. And if they decide to go to ENS (or Polytechnique, which is the best engineering school but still quite researchy if you want to), this is actually one of the most prestigious options you could take.
Similarly, the prestige of engineering (and science to some extent) impacts what people decide to do after their degrees. I remember that in my good prepa and my good engineering school, the cool ones were those going to build planes and bridges. The ones who went into consulting and finance were pitied and mocked as the failures, not the impressive successes to emulate. Yet what my UK friends tell me is that this is the exact opposite of what happens even in great universities in the UK.
This has become less true, as more private schools open, and the whole elitist system is wormed out by software engineering startups (which generally doesn’t ask you for an engineering degree, as opposed to the older big french companies).
One point evoked by other comments, which I’ve realized only after leaving France and living in the UK, is that there is still a massive prestige for engineering. ENS is not technically an engineering school, but it benefits from this prestige by being lumped with them, and by being accessed mainly from the national contests at the end of Prepas.
As always with these kind of cultural phenomena, I didn’t really notice them until I left France for the UK. There is a sense in France (more when I was a student, but still there) that the most prestigious jobs are engineering ones. Going to engineering school is considered one of the top options (with medecine), and it is considered a given that any good student with a knack for maths, physics, science, will go to prepa and engineering school.[1] It’s almost free (and in practice is free if your parents don’t make more than a certain amount), and it is guaranteed to lead to a good future.
This means that the vast majority of mathematical talent studies the equivalent of a undergraduate degree in maths, compressed in the span of 2 years. In addition of giving the standard french engineer much more of a mathematical training, it shows to the potential mathematicians, by default, a lot of what they could do. And if they decide to go to ENS (or Polytechnique, which is the best engineering school but still quite researchy if you want to), this is actually one of the most prestigious options you could take.
Similarly, the prestige of engineering (and science to some extent) impacts what people decide to do after their degrees. I remember that in my good prepa and my good engineering school, the cool ones were those going to build planes and bridges. The ones who went into consulting and finance were pitied and mocked as the failures, not the impressive successes to emulate. Yet what my UK friends tell me is that this is the exact opposite of what happens even in great universities in the UK.
This has become less true, as more private schools open, and the whole elitist system is wormed out by software engineering startups (which generally doesn’t ask you for an engineering degree, as opposed to the older big french companies).