Cédric Villani: mathematician challenging to be Paris mayor

As a Frenchman who greatly benefited from free Universities I was about to verbally tear you a new asshole, but I don't actually disagree as much as I thought with what you wrote and I appreciate the time you put in writing a nuanced take.

Point 3 I think is a given, social aids should be given proportionally to the financial needs of each student. The fact that I paid almost the same as a child from a poor family as some of my friends did while being bankrolled by their parents is not normal.

Point 1 I agree but with caveats. The issue is that ROI is hard to estimate. If you just use "money" as the metric then you end up with only shallow education system where only the rich can afford to study the classics and everybody else has to be a good little drone. Money doesn't quantify social good, and an educated population is a good thing to have even if not everybody is an engineer. Maybe a set of scholarships should be set aside for the students willing to sacrifice themselves to fill that need, and the rest of the available funds be divided among people who have a career plan? It might cut down on the number of kids going into biology, psychology or business administration as a place holder until they figured out their life.

Point 2 is even harder because I was a barely passing high school student, but I now have a PhD in computer science and I teach in a Russell Group university in England - high school performance is a piss poor indicator of academic ambition, and should not be used as a proxy for it. My personal opinion is that conditioning funding on effort, rather than results, would be a better thing - show up to classes and do the work and the funding will keep coming even if you have a few setbacks here and there. That's already in place in our current funding system in France, but the administrative cost means that there is often a one year lag between the student completely slacking off and the CROUS cutting off their stipend.

About parcoursup, nobody really knows up to my knowledge.

About the tuition for foreigner, very few university applied it, and it has been declared unconstitutional by the "conseil constitutionnel" (it's kind of the french supreme court).

>Racism isn't about race. Otherwise it wouldn't exist: there is only one human race.

Offtopic but I wonder, where does this notion come from?

Biologically there is more variance in the humans species than in others species that we consider to having races. One example of big phisical distinction is themarathon winner's race, most modern marathon winners descend from the same tribes, and have very distinct physiology due to millenia of adapting to persistence hunting. Literally evolution.

My definition of racism was always: race based discrimination. Aa in I should not treat you different because of your race. The definition about denying even the existence of different human races seems weird to me, as there seem to be a lack evidence to support the inexistence of different human races.

This is not correct.

With the previous system, APB (Admission Post-Bac), candidates ordered their wishes, and a bunch of (known, public) criteria were used to rank students in each of the curriculum they enter in their wishes. There criteria included, among other things and as the most important factor the position of the curriculum in the candidate ordered wishlist. So if a candidate placed a curriculum at the top of their wishlist, the particular curriculum will prefer this student over one who placed it in the third position for example.

Now, with the new system, Parcoursup, two main things changed.

The first thing: curriculum have to manually order candidates according to whatever criteria they want. Universities are given access to grades and high school of the candidates. This can lead to (sometimes unconscious) discrimination (candidate from a prestigious high school is more likely to get what they want compared to someone who went to a suburb high school, for example). This is already stupid. The fact is also that candidates do not know the criteria in advance, and that the criteria may differ (and trust me, they do!) depending on each university and curriculum. Grades now may be a part of the selection, but they do not have to. And there is no way to really know if they do and if so, how.

This is a nightmare for candidates (and their parents).

The second thing: candidates can no longer order their wishes. This is really, reaaaaaaally, plain stupid. And it is what can lead to deadlock as I explained in another comment. It is no longer possible to apply an optimal pairing algorithm such as stable marriage (Gale-Shapley, of which a variant was used by APB). So the professors managing each curriculum have to manually set the number of candidate they call in their ordered list. If your department has 100 places for new students, then you might call the top 200 of your candidate local ranking at first, knowing that some of them with strong application will also be called somewhere else (because they most likely have a strong application there too) and they might prefer to go there. Now what happens when you have say 70 confirmed wishes and you are left with 50 candidates waiting. If they are waiting, it's most likely because they would like another university better than yours, but they can't let your offer go as long as they are not sure that this other university offers them a place. And in this other university, the situation is the same, with other people who may prefer to go to your university. And there we have a deadlock. A completely stupid deadlock that would be avoidable trivially if candidates could simply order their wishes.

This leads to even more stress for candidates and their family because it often takes up month before the situation is little by little solved by candidate settling for their second or third choice while it would have been possible to make everyone more happy way more quickly.

Well, as you might expect, many successful American mathematicians studied at top American universities such as Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Chicago, Michigan, etc. (Not sure if your were expecting a significantly different answer.)