France, where the grossly unprepared try for maths degrees

“LIKE organising a shipwreck in order to find out who can swim,” is how Alain Peyrefitte, then France’s education minister, described his country’s non-selective system of recruiting university students half a century ago. Peyrefitte hoped to transform the system by introducing selective admissions. He failed, and instead triggered the student uprising of May 1968. Now President Emmanuel Macron, attempting a similar reform, has also brought students out on the streets (see ), and the French hear echoes of . But he is right to try to reform a wasteful higher-education system, just as Peyrefitte was. France’s model is inefficient, inequitable and allows too many young people to sink without a chance.