Reactivation of France in danger of shortage of engineers

Reactivating France, a lot. Would it be enough to solemnly announce the end of several decades of deindustrialization, the end of happy globalization, so that everything goes as Emmanuel Macron or another Bruno the Mayor would like? Maybe not. To reactivate, you need money – the State has put it into its various recovery plans – but you also need something else. Human resources. And that’s where the problem is, because France doesn’t have that. There are no special workers, but also engineers.

And it is partly a direct result of the government action taken in Emmanuel Macron’s first five-year term that brings us to this sad scene: we are not only seeing a lack of engineers in France, but worse, there are fewer candidates. At the beginning of the school year 2023 – 2024, the number of new entrants to the first year of the engineering cycle fell by 11.5%, 42,239 students entered this sector according to figures from the Ministry of Higher Education and Research. There were 47,745 in the previous year.

The ministry attributes this decline to “mainly due to a decline in the number of applicants for admission which was previously from DUTs and which is now continuing in the 3rd year of ACH», the DUTs were reformed in 2021, increasing the number of years required from 2 to 3 years (from BTS level to Licensing level) to obtain the diploma necessary to continue the course in engineering school. But not everyone shares this explanation.

a shortage of at least 10,000 engineers

On September 4, the Maths&Sciences Collective published an article on the World and offers a different perspective. In his crusades, Jean-Michel Blanquer. Or more precisely, the Barrier reform that stopped…