France puts a fivefold increase on the table, and then takes it off again

A government-commissioned report says that the funding model for universities “will no longer be sustainable by 2030”, and reaches for a fivefold rise in tuition fees to help fix it.

But the minister who commissioned it has taken to X to insist that nothing of the kind is going to happen, that he’s said so before, and that he’ll say it again as often as needed.

Jérôme Fournel, inspecteur général des finances (a senior official at France’s state finance inspectorate, the IGF) and former chief of staff to ex-prime minister Michel Barnier, and Gilles Roussel, president of Université Gustave Eiffel and former president of France Universités, this week handed ministers the final report of the Assises du financement des universités – a formal, government-commissioned review of how universities are funded.

It’s the product of five months and more than 78 meetings commissioned back in January to build what was called a “shared, rigorous, incontestable diagnostic” of how French universities are paid for.

The diagnostic part is bleak. Charges have risen 39 per cent since 2018, driven almost entirely by the pay bill, which now eats 80 per cent of universities’ costs thanks to pension contributions, “Guérini” pay-point rises (nationally-set civil-service pay increases that universities must absorb) and an ageing workforce the State largely imposed and only partly compensated.

The number of universities under a formal financial-recovery procedure has gone from nine in 2025 to 14 in 2026, France Universités reckons every single university voted a deficit opening budget for 2026, and the report’s own projection has the sector’s books sliding to a deficit of around €2bn by 2030 if nothing changes.

Cash looks comfortable until you notice that less than 10 per cent of it is actually free to spend – the rest is pre-committed to projects and buildings – which is the point the universities have been making for years and the Cour des comptes (France’s national audit office) confirmed in April.

So far, so sustainability-bulletin. Then comes the recommendation that’s on front of every French paper.

Fournel and Roussel propose that tuition fees rise until they make up “around 10 per cent” of university income, against roughly 3 per cent now – raising in the order of €1.5bn. In plain numbers, a year of an undergraduate licence (France’s three-year bachelor’s degree) would go from about €178 to around €900, and a master’s year from about €254 to €1,300. The press, reasonably enough, translated that as multiplying fees by five.

That means a three-year licence priced at today’s rates would move from around €534 to €2,700. The report itself reaches for the phrase others have used for months and calls fees “the elephant in the room.” Having named the elephant, it has now put a price tag round its neck.

Liberté, égalité, gratuité

France has a constitutional problem many others don’t – the Conseil constitutionnel (France’s constitutional court) has held that the requirement of gratuité (free provision) applies to public higher education, and the Conseil d’État (its supreme administrative court) allows fees only so long as they stay “modique,” modest, judged against the cost of the course and the exemptions on offer, “so that they do not, in themselves, obstruct equal access to education.” You can’t just announce a fee. You have to argue it’s still basically free.

The report tries. It leans hard on a 2025 IGF-IGÉSR (the French finance and education inspectorates) finding that current fees represent just 1.9 per cent of the estimated cost of the courses they buy, and concludes that:

…a reasoned increase in this share seems achievable without calling equal access into question.

The entire fees case is reverse-engineered not to raise the most money, but to clear a constitutional bar. €900 is “modest” because it’s a small fraction of what a degree costs to deliver, and the gratuity doctrine is about access rather than price.

The part that didn’t make the headlines is tucked into a single clause of the synthesis and a couple of lines of fiche six (the report’s sixth thematic section). Any fee rise, the report says, must come with “a mechanism to support students covering every aspect of student life – integrating not only tuition but also housing – on the basis of income-contingent repayment loans,” with a public body such as the Caisse des dépôts (France’s state deposits-and-investments fund) guaranteeing the scheme so that private banks can sell the loans.

Premiers de cordée

The fees line is one leg of a wider pitch the report calls “diversification” – more apprenticeship income, more continuing education, more corporate partnership, more philanthropy, more monetising of the estate, all to make universities “more resilient.”

The trouble is that every one of those levers rewards the universities that are already large, research-intensive and well-located, and does nothing for the small teaching-heavy ones whose income is almost entirely the core grant. Resilience, on the report’s own evidence, is a divergence machine.

What the report refuses to do tells us more than what it proposes. It rejects allocating the core grant per student as simplistic, and it rejects reallocating between institutions, promising instead to “rebase” the underfunded only out of future growth – a guaranteed floor of just plus 1 per cent a year for everyone, with the rest discretionary.

Meanwhile the historic gap it declines to close runs, on 2022 Senate figures, from €2,037 of core grant per student at the least-funded university to €13,194 at the most favoured, against a mean of €6,720. The least-funded, teaching-heavy places – your Montpellier Paul-Valérys (humanities-heavy universities) – stay structurally behind, and are then told to make up the difference by diversifying, which is the one thing their size and subject mix make hardest.

Students aren’t happy. Suzanne Nijdam of FAGE (a major French student-union federation) warned against the “adéquationniste” (matching course provision to labour-market demand) drift of letting business into the room to decide “how many places to keep” and “which masters and licences to close” on the grounds they aren’t “priority.”

Clara Privé of UNEF (a major French student union) called the fee rise “selection by money” and a “colossal increase,” and the union has said it would walk out of any talks where fees were tabled and call for “general mobilisation” if a government picked the proposals up.

The Union étudiante (another French student union), blunter still, said the report “confirms Macron’s objective” of making access “a privilege based on money and nationality” and promised a fight at the autumn rentrée (the September start of the academic year).

Back in March, an intersyndicale (a joint union front) of staff and student unions had already walked out of the Quai Branly plenary calling the whole exercise an “écran de fumée” – a smokescreen.

FAGE’s other point is that it’s the classes moyennes (the middle classes) who get hit first, too well-off for the bursaries that would exempt them, too stretched to absorb an extra €722 a year per child. Everything that’s meant to protect those students – the “refounded” bursary system, the inter-university equalisation of 10 to 15 per cent, the income-contingent loans – is asserted in the report and never designed. The pain is concrete – the cushioning is a promise.

Also buried in the steering fiche is a proposal that universities should get far more latitude to set their own admission capacities, “to better match them to the means available.”

Dressed as financial prudence, that’s selection by another route, and the only person who has said so is the minister, who conceded that reducing the State’s role in setting capacities would mechanically “change the postulate” that “all baccalaureate holders can continue their studies” (the baccalauréat is the school-leaving qualification that carries an automatic right to a university place), and that this would need a much bigger debate about what it is even for.

So universities should be free to turn applicants away to balance the books, which is fine, except that it ends the open-access settlement, which is not a footnote-sized matter.

Circulez, rien à voir

Will any of it happen? The State commissioned, paid for and published a report recommending the largest domestic fee rise in the modern history of the system – and the responsible minister, Philippe Baptiste, has responded by insisting it isn’t going to happen.

The government has no plan to raise tuition fees,” he posted. “I’ve said it many times, I repeat it, and I’ll say it again if necessary” – the matter, he added, is one for the 2027 presidential campaign.

So is it even on the table? The job was commissioned in January by Baptiste and Amélie de Montchalin at public accounts – by June, after a reshuffle, it was being received by David Amiel (de Montchalin’s successor at public accounts) – so even the ministers who ordered the diagnosis weren’t all in post to read it.

And the co-author asking universities to charge their students five times more is Gilles Roussel, who as a sitting president stood on the barricades in December 2024 and told reporters that public funding per student had fallen 15 per cent since 2017.

The per-student number is a small lesson in how to read a report like this. The headline the authors repeat – core grant up 26 per cent in cash since 2018, students up only 3 per cent – is true, and is there to rebut the sector’s poverty plea.

But most of that rise is volatile, margin-thin intermediated money like apprenticeship income, and the per-student figure moves wherever you start the clock and whatever you count – the report says minus 8 per cent since 2010 with social and fiscal measures folded in, Snesup-FSU (the main university staff union) says minus 18.5 per cent since 2009, Roussel-the-president said minus 15 per cent since 2017, and the intersyndicale put the supervision rate down 22 per cent.

Money went up. Conditions went down. Both are true, and which one you lead with is the whole argument.

So the €2bn cliff is asserted from “broad-brush” trend lines the report admits are rough. The bursary reform that makes the fee rise progressive is undesigned. The loan book that would make it bearable is unmodelled.

What is fully worked up, costed and pre-cleared against the constitution is the blueprint itself – fees at 10 per cent of income, income-contingent loans, capacity controls, the lot – now sitting in a drawer with a minister’s denial stapled to the front.

The only question that matters is whether that denial has a shelf life longer than the 2027 election, or whether getting the thing written, priced and constitutionally road-tested was the point all along – so that whoever wins can reach for it the moment the politics allows.