Among the French government’s school concessions, one promise has a symbolic weight that the others do not: to replace Parcoursup by 2028. Parcoursup is the platform that allocates higher education places in France, and for students, it has become a symbol of a system they describe as opaque and elitist, where a computer, not a person, decides whether a student can study the subject they want, at the university they want, in the city they want. Replacing it is therefore not an administrative reform, but a political concession to a grievance that has fuelled student anger for years.
Parcoursup works by matching student applications to university places, using criteria that include grades, school reports and, critics argue, the reputation of the student’s high school, which can disadvantage students from poorer areas, or from schools that are less well known to admissions officers. Students describe a process where they apply to multiple courses, wait for offers, and receive rejections without a clear explanation of why one student was chosen and another was not. That opacity, more than any single rejection, is what students object to, because it makes the system feel arbitrary, even when it is following rules.
The government’s promise to replace Parcoursup by 2028, presented on Monday as part of a package that also cancels 836 planned teacher cuts, adds 500 new teaching positions, devotes almost 4.5 billion dollars to school buildings by 2030, and caps class sizes at 28, is the package’s longest term commitment, and the one that will take the most work to deliver. A replacement platform must be designed, tested and rolled out, with input from students, teachers and universities, and it must be more transparent than its predecessor, or it will simply reproduce the same grievances under a new name.
Why students do not trust a new platform yet
Student unions applauded the initial steps, but said they will continue leading protests until a comprehensive funding plan is put forward, and their scepticism about Parcoursup’s replacement reflects a lesson from past reforms: a platform built by the same administration, with the same criteria, and the same lack of transparency, will not rebuild trust, even if it has a new name. Students want to be involved in designing the replacement, not merely informed of it, and they want criteria that are published, explained and open to appeal, so that a rejection comes with a reason, not just a notification.
Universities, for their part, want a system that allows them to select students fairly, without being overwhelmed by applications, and without being forced to accept students for courses they cannot teach. Balancing student choice with university capacity is the hard problem at the heart of Parcoursup, and it will not be solved by a new interface alone. It requires decisions about funding, about places, and about which subjects are expanded, and which are capped, decisions that are political, not technical.
What 2028 will judge
By 2028, when the replacement is supposed to be in place, students will judge it by a simple test: can I understand why I was accepted or rejected, and do I believe the process was fair? If the answer is yes, the replacement will have succeeded, even if not every student gets their first choice, because fairness, not success, is what students are asking for. If the answer is no, the Parcoursup grievance will return, under a new name, and with a new generation of students who were promised a better system and did not get one.
That is why the Parcoursup promise, among all the concessions, is the one to watch. Class sizes can be measured, teacher posts can be counted, and buildings can be photographed, but trust in a platform is measured only by the students who use it, and by whether they believe, when they apply, that the system will treat them fairly, regardless of their school, their background, or their postcode.
