Carry out “a little housekeeping” between training courses and make Parcoursup “the space of confidence” for future students: faced with the “absurdities” of private higher education, the Senate adopted on the night of Monday June 1 to Tuesday June 2 a bill to regulate the sector. Examined at first reading, the government text was approved largely by show of hands, and now awaits its inclusion on the agenda of the National Assembly, on a date which still remains unknown in an overloaded agenda.
The reform attacks a sector that has been booming in recent years, that of private higher education, which today concerns one in four students. Growth in particular due to the growth in learning, and which is not without creating certain windfall effects, revealed in 2025 in the book “Le Cube” by journalist Claire Marchal on the sector giant Galileo.
“Abuses exist”, certainly “minority” but “serious” and “unbearable”, recognized the Minister of Higher Education Philippe Baptiste, listing the cases of students asked to pay “reservation fees” to ensure their place or of students “forced to pay for a full year when they had to interrupt their training for good reasons”. The project therefore provides for a new system with Parcoursup as a “cornerstone”: access of private establishments to the post-baccalaureate guidance platform will be conditional on validation by the State.
Withdrawal
Two levels of recognition are provided: accreditation and general interest accreditation, issued for a limited period after an evaluation of the “overall quality” of the training by the High Council for the Evaluation of Research and Higher Education (Hcéres).
General interest approval, more valued than simple approval, can only be granted to non-profit establishments which contribute to public service missions, base their training on research, organize student life and enter into a contract with the State.
“This mechanism will make it possible to highlight training courses which directly play the role of evaluation”, but also “to clean up the existing offer a little”, argued the minister. The Senate, dominated by the right, gave the green light to this reform, useful for “separating the wheat from the chaff” and “promoting training of excellence” according to Les Républicains senator Max Brisson.
The text also establishes a reinforced right of withdrawal for students and prohibits certain fees. The Senate also voted to increase the financial contribution of the employer of an apprentice not from an approved establishment. Like the Conference of Grandes Écoles (CGE), which called on Monday to “go further”, the left expressed its reservations on this project, nevertheless failing to transform this accreditation regime into an authorization regime prior to the opening of a school.
“There is every reason to fear that this will only serve to regulate establishments which are already regulated”, and not the “pharmacies” which have precisely as a “selling point” their absence from Parcoursup, worried the socialist Yan Chantrel, from whom the group abstained. The government wants it to come into force at the start of the 2028 school year, but the Senate preferred to count on the start of the 2027 school year, thus encouraging the government to take action to enable rapid adoption of the reform in Parliament.
