In his final engagement before resigning as finance minister last year, Emmanuel Macron, now the president of France, visited one of the country’s most prestigious higher education institutions. “He spoke to each and every start-up based at our business incubator centre, discussed their projects, and they all took selfies with him,” Jacques Biot, the president of Ecole Polytechnique, who hosted Macron’s visit to the Paris grande école in August 2016, told Times Higher Education.

And while Biot declared himself “very happy” that the 39-year-old former investment banker subsequently won the presidential run-off against far-Right candidate Marine Le Pen on May 7, entrepreneurs at his institution will be even more thrilled. With Macron in the Elysee Palace, “some start-ups will raise funds for their businesses much more easily” thanks to their Macron selfies, jokes Biot, himself a successful entrepreneur and investor in health sciences who took the reins of his alma mater in July 2013.

Macron’s vocal support for science — which has included a video message to US scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs in February urging them to relocate to France — seems to augur well for Ecole Polytechnique, a highly research-intensive institution, where 30 percent of graduates press on for Ph Ds.

Biot, who in the 1980s served as an adviser to Laurent Fabius, the socialist prime minister, says Macron had spoken “much more about excellence than size” — a reference to continuing reforms to bring together many of France’s often tiny higher education institutions into clusters with a critical mass that will allow them to crack the upper echelons of global university rankings inhabited by the likes of Harvard, Stanford and Oxford universities.

The largest of these mega-universities is Paris-Saclay, with its campus south of the French capital where Ecole Polytechnique has been based since the 1970s. Adjacent to Ecole Polytechnique, some 60,000 students and 11,000 academic staff of 19 institutions will be based on the campus. The Paris-Saclay project was awarded the equivalent of £6 billion (Rs.38,690 crore) in initial funding, with the expectation that it will produce about 15 percent of France’s research output each year.

Macron’s emphasis on promoting excellence, rather than stressing the need for ever-larger universities, will help Ecole Polytechnique (which has just 3,000 students) to “stay on the verge of Saclay”, says Biot, and not sacrifice its august history. “Polytechniciens” attend their graduation ceremony in Napoleonic-style military uniforms, a nod to the institution’s origins as a military academy founded at the end of the 18th century to train engineers.

While Ecole Polytechnique remains at the heart of the Saclay project, it has been made clear to the institution that it “would not lose our name, brand or our strategic agility,” Biot said on a visit to London to launch an €80 million (Rs.576 crore) fundraising campaign.

While France’s grande écoles have been criticised for their arcane admissions procedures — applicants must complete a two-year preparatory course after high school before taking a national exam — Biot says his institution’s creation of different admission routes and, from this autumn, several new English-only programmes shows that it is far more progressive than often perceived.

“About 40 percent of students on our (English language courses) don’t speak French when they arrive, but they will learn when they join our programme,” he says, emphasising the flexibility that has allowed the institution to recruit highly able students from across the world, including one of its first students from the UK.

Ecole Polytechnique’s ambitions to attract the very best scientific minds — 40 percent of its faculty are international — chimes with President Macron’s desire to win the global race for scientific talent, so the institution can probably expect a few more selfies on campus with the young French president over the next five years.

(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist and Times Higher Education)