Education Abroad: Falling Short in Europe

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If education is the key to economic growth and personal fulfillment, as Americans fervently believe, then Western Europe is in a bad jam. So warns Raymond Poignant, 48, who is a graduate of the tough Ecole Nationals d'Administration, a top French educational planner, and a judge of administrative law at the Counseil d'Etat (France's highest tribunal). His comparison of the educational systems in Western Europe, the U.S. and Russia has just been published under the auspices of the six Common Market countries.

The 180 million people in the Common Market roughly match the U.S.'195 million and the Soviet Union's 228 million. Yet in the last years for which full figures are known (variously 1963 and 1964), Western Europe graduated only 101,000 university students as compared with 450,000 in the U.S. and 345,000 in Russia. While 20% of college-age Americans and 8% of Russians get degrees, the Common Market proportion is only 4%.

Europe's failure to keep up is most alarming in science. The six countries graduated only 12,000 scientists; the U.S. graduated 52,000 and Russia at least 21,000. West Germany, which ranks first in industry among the nations of Western Europe, graduated only 2,518 scientists: a severe shortage looms there.

Europe's problem is in part due to the fact that its universities, though often glorious inheritances from the Renaissance, are not very numerous. West Germany has only 48 universities and other institutions of higher learning, Belgium 20 and France 40, while the Soviet Union has 719 and the U.S. 2,080. But the crux of the problem lies in the antiquated European grade and high school structure, which was progressive at the time of Napoleon and is now a positive drag.

Under this system, children at the age of eleven or twelve are separated into those who are potentially college stuff and those—mostly of working-class backgrounds—who will end up in vocational and technical high schools. The 34% of U.S. college students who are children of laborers, and the 17% of Russians, are matched by only 7.5% in Germany and 12.6% in France. What Europe needs, in effect, says Poignant, is an American-style high school system, with all students in the same kind of school through the age of 16 or 18. Then the slugging match to enter colleges would not be shut off to any bright child, regardless of background, and both the nations and the children would benefit.