How do students fit into our society, and how do they choose their course today? Decryption with the sociologist Jean Viard.
Relief, frustration or questions, all these feelings were mixed Thursday evening, June 1, when those registered with Parcoursup received the first answers from the device, this system of distribution of students in the different branches of higher education. We talk about these students with the sociologist Jean Viard.
franceinfo: The relationship to the world of work has changed a lot in a few years. On the other hand, do we have the same relationship to studies as before?
John Viard: There are more than 900,000 young people who are going through Parcoursup, and who started in January, it’s a very long procedure. Then on the side, there are in particular the apprentices, it is taken back a lot the apprentices, it is one of the reasons besides for the decline in unemployment. So the question of having more and more students and knowing how they access higher education is an extremely complicated question.
Some were already pre-selected, medical students, students of the BTS and the Grandes Ecoles… There, there was already a very strong selection, but the discourse in France has always been: we do not select, the student chooses . One thing leading to another, we invented a huge machine called Parcoursup, relatively authoritative, there is a certain choice, but quite weak.
Me, I passed the baccalaureate in 68, so inevitably, it was not the same time. So, I have the feeling that there was a problem, it was that there was a huge mass of young people, for example one year, there are 50,000 who want to do psycho, how do we make teachers? How were we going to do it? We invented this machine. I see her as authoritarian, and quite inhuman and basically, they are more stressed today by Parcoursup than by the baccalaureate. That was still not the goal.
Is that moment, when we choose our orientation, our studies, always so fateful, when we regularly repeat that we will not do a single job throughout our lives?
But that’s what bothers me. I concluded economic meetings in a university, three years ago, and a student after my intervention, gets up, and asks me: I am a student in this university, do you have any advice for me to my direction? And I answered him: do a plumber’s CAP, to complete your training, because your life of tomorrow, you don’t know where it will be.
And that is fundamental, because ChatGPT is going to further increase the number of white collar workers who are going to disappear because ChatGPT is not going to touch creation, nor the working hands, nor those who decide, but it can touch the intermediate levels. It seems to me that the challenge for a young person today is to have training that is sufficiently distant, to be able to grasp the reality of a totally unexpected world, into which we are entering.
You have to have knowledge of a manual trade, is that what you are telling us, since intellectual trades, so to speak, are going to be replaced by artificial intelligence?
Certain intellectual professions… No, it’s also because I think that in France, we have underestimated manual professions too much, but these are professions where you learn a lot of things, professions where you create with your hands , and in France, it’s true that we valued everything in white-collar jobs. I think we have gone much too far, that manual trades are trades that can be marvelous, where you can find fulfillment, so I think that young people who have one foot in the manual and perhaps two feet in the intellectual would be young people who would be better trained.
Studies remain important nevertheless for access to the professional world?
Studies remain very important. Obviously, this is not the only way. The family is also a network. For example, where do you find a job? Before Pôle emploi, there are family networks, we must not hide it. And then there is learning, yes, you have to learn, one way or another. Then there are family transmissions. Often, doctors are sons of doctors, peasants are sons of peasants, and we also learn, at the daily table, we learn on Sundays, we learn by watching our parents work…
There are different places of learning, but it is clear that we are in a digital society, where you have to be comfortable with computers, in writing, you also have to be bilingual, we are in this society of mobility, transformation, innovation, a society whose forms we don’t know in the next 10, 20 or 30 years with the ecological revolution so let’s arm ourselves to manage this randomness and be always ready to adapt to it.