Posts by milonz

Re: Degree equivalence...?

As a matter of fact, OpenClassrooms will never deliver official degrees in France.

France's higher educational ecosystem is pretty weird (has a lot of flaws, but also a lot of qualities), which cannot be summarized in a few words.

In France, you have the "Grandes Ecoles" (the Great Schools), which are for the elites, by the elites. They are utterly selective and teach top-notch courses. However, they do behave like Mafia (co-option, nomination & politics) despite being public schools, and they do have overly generalist curriculums : a "Grandes Ecoles" graduate is expected to know everything and have pleasant conversations at the Ambassador's dinner parties ;-)

Albert Jacquard, one of the XXth century greatest scientists, has said that Polytechnique (the greatest french Great School) selects the most conformist students, the ones that are the most dangerous for the country, for the key positions (a first-hand experience, he was himself a polytechnician).

In France, an official engineer is as much a job as a very high social status, so they are very few and they are viewed as an elite.

Then, you've got the public universities, somewhat underfunded, and still too generalist. French university graduates make good professors, researchers and scholars, but poor company workers.

Because they don't have the "feet on the ground" approach, nor the specific professionnal qualifications companies ask for, especially in the CompSci field (lack of funds, a curriculum "lag", and a pretty high population). Still, they are pretty smart and have a great general culture, so some do succeed.

There stops the list of the "official" degrees, which require to have a very broad core knowledge (an american engineer will be considered as a trained monkey / imbecile by any french engineer, as an example).

But there is also a lot of unofficial private engineer's schools, especially in the CompSci, which degrees are unrecognised by the national educational system. These schools exist because they don't want to fit the national program, and are very often more specialised and much more oriented towards a corporate career. One great example can be the EPITA school, which students are very sought after by private companies.

So in France, you don't really have a public-private schools cohabitation, but a real schism between two conceptions of what education should be. Two different approaches, one which seeks to train scholars and one which seeks to train professionnals.

Therefore, a school like OpenClassrooms can have excellent courses, but the degrees are considered unofficial as a scholarship, as they are professionnal trainings. However, most companies will recognise them as "good enough" and will gladly hire graduates, as long as OpenClassrooms has a good reputation and their curriculums stays aligned with what they require.

PS : i may sound like partial, it's because i've myself graduated from a french private engineer's school, and i've never been interested by the Great Schools or public university curriculums (i've even had 2 boooooring years at the public uni')