New lucrative higher education establishments risk going bankrupt this year, warns an inspection report published Friday June 26 which points to “failing” controls by the authorities and makes recommendations to protect students.
Failures of establishments “are expected to continue in the coming months”, warns this report from the general inspectorates of social affairs (Igas) and education (IGESR), which calls on public authorities to “mobilize to ensure good support for students in the pursuit of their studies”.
This report, resulting from the mission entrusted to the inspections in May 2025, targets the use of public funds and the quality of training provided in this growing sector, where a year of schooling can cost up to €10,000.
“This growth dynamic has been accompanied by significant recourse to debt, which, combined with the requirement for profitability, leads schools to have to generate sufficient cash flow each year to ensure the sustainability of the model (…) The levels of debt observed also expose certain groups to increased financial fragilities,” warn the inspections.
They were seized after the revelations in the book Le Cube by journalist Claire Marchal on the sector giant Galileo Global Education, which highlighted abuses – non-refundable reservation fees, crowded classes, eroded lesson times and a race for returns to the detriment of quality.
The inspectors checked this group – owned in particular by a Canadian public pension fund – and Collège de Paris – owned by the founding brothers and two investment funds. Their report has a “more general” scope on the sector. “The mission draws a worrying observation: the quality of a large number of training courses provided appears insufficient, the public authorities have no overall vision of the sector and the evaluation and control systems present significant deficiencies,” summarizes the report.
“These inadequacies pose numerous risks to some of the 400,000 students in the private lucrative sector, or around 15% of students: misleading commercial window dressing, educational gaps, unfulfilled promises of integration, student life reduced to a minimum,” deplore the inspectors, who make 32 recommendations.
“Systemic” risk
The report recommends requiring groups, whose closure presents a “systemic” risk, to present a plan for the continuation of students’ studies, to ban the “bachelor’s” and “master’s” labels, sources of confusion with national diplomas, or to ensure the transparency of professional integration results.
In the newspaper Les Échos, the Minister of Higher Education Philippe Baptiste said he was “generally in favor” of the recommendations, which partly match the draft law regulating the sector, adopted at first reading in the Senate on June 1.
“The aim of the game is simply to rule out the thugs in the bench who defraud students and discredit the entire private sector and for whom we today have no means of verifying the quality of what they propose,” adds the minister who hopes that the bill will be examined in the Assembly in September.
According to the report, “the absence of global regulation (…) as well as the existence of flaws and limits in each of the existing evaluation and control systems have thus led to establishments presenting serious dysfunctions being allowed to act for several years – when others were showing positive elements”.
The Talis Education and Collège de Paris groups have entered into safeguard proceedings, and the judicial liquidation of Digital College – subject to a legal report – and Exchange College, which belonged to the Collège de Paris group, was recently declared.
The private sector has experienced strong growth since 2018, thanks in particular to the apprenticeship law. Among these schools, some are for-profit: they most often belong to private groups, sometimes controlled by investment funds, whose objective is to make a profit, unlike private non-profit establishments. Public aid for learning can represent up to 50 to 70% of the turnover of these schools.
