Minister rules out explosive proposal to hike tuition fees

French Higher Education, Research and Space Minister Philippe Baptiste has ruled out an explosive recommendation of the report he commissioned in January to analyse the dire state of French university finances and to propose remedies.

The report released last week (25 June) called for an increase in annual tuition fees paid by French students from €178 (US$202.9) to €900 a year for a bachelor degree and from €254 to €1,300 a year for a masters.

This would earn universities an extra €1.5 billion net a year and help raise the share of total university funding from all types of fees to 10%, it added. At the moment, fees for bachelor and masters are estimated to represent 1.9% of tuition costs.

“The government has no plans for increasing university tuition fees,” Baptiste said on X just after the report was presented. “I have said it numerous times, and will say it again if I have to.”

But his pledge may hold true for less than a year, since France will elect a new president next spring. Opinion polls show that the opposition far-right party National Rally candidate – either Marine Le Pen or Jordan Bardella – would win, which could foreshadow major policy changes. The French constitution bars outgoing centre-right president Emmanuel Macron from running for a third consecutive term.

Funding model is unsustainable

The 110-page report by Jérôme Fournel, finance inspector general and former chief of staff to ex-prime minister Michel Barnier, and Gilles Roussel, former president of the Gustave Eiffel University, said the French public university funding model “would no longer be sustainable by 2030”.

Universities were granted autonomy 19 years ago, but progress has been uneven and has been shackled by the limited options available for funding, the report said.

State subsidies, which in 2025 accounted for 76% of total public university funding, should occupy the largest chunk, it added. Beyond that, as well as fee increases, sources of cash should be diversified into seasonal rentals of premises, the development of non-State paying courses and partnerships with business and local authorities.

The projected drop in the student population by 2033 should foster schemes for opening up universities to other groups from the general public, the report said.

On the personnel side, the state must stop “forcing” universities to recruit temporary contractual staff to handle applied research projects funded by the National Research Agency. Allowing permanent staff to work on such projects would help reduce the payroll bill, it said.

Otherwise, public university spending increases and stagnating revenues could lead to a deficit of €2 billion by the end of the decade, they said. This would lead to “drastic” reductions in courses and research and increases in charges.

The initial idea was for the report to be the culmination of five months of consultations with university management, staff, students and other actors. But teacher and student unions boycotted the discussions and now say they were right to do so.

HE turning into a ‘commercial commodity’

Calling them the “consultations of shame’,” the student union UNEF said in a statement that the proposals echoed President Emmanuel Macron’s wish to turn the higher education and research public service into a commercial commodity.

Fee increases would be “catastrophic” for universities and students, who would be selected by money, it said. Involvement of business would amount to “privatisation”. Companies “have no place in public universities”, the statement added. They would “endanger teaching and research independence and academic freedom.”

Dubbing the consultations a “masquerade”, the higher education teachers’ union SNESUP-FSU said the report signalled clearly the State’s withdrawal from public universities and public services in general.

It challenged some of the report’s figures, saying State university subsidies had dropped by 1.7% in real terms rather than risen between 2018 and 2025. The cost of the extra 44,000 students enrolled in 2018 to 2024 was borne entirely by the establishments themselves, the union said.

France Universités, which is made up of the heads of French universities and other higher education establishments, welcomed the report’s recommendations on increased state subsidies, and more autonomy for staffing, student enrolment and property management.

It dismissed the idea of fee increases without the long-awaited overhaul to student social assistance, and noted that far from “frequent caricatures”, French public universities have undergone major transformation and now have considerable leverage for running their own financial affairs.

Baptiste has not said whether he would follow the other recommendations of the report. By the time of going to press, the ministry had not responded to University World News’ request for clarification on these points.