The Parcoursup season has started.
... and data from previous years is available as open data!
A good time to look at the shares of girls, scholarship holders and students from outside Paris in eight science prépas in the Paris region whose exam results put them at the top of the rankings every year.
1. Students from outside Paris
In an earlier post I looked at admissions to École polytechnique by geographic origin. The share of students admitted from preparatory classes outside Paris had kept falling over the past twenty years.
One reader rightly pointed out that the académie where students took their baccalauréat is a better measure of how many come from outside Paris, since many of them join preparatory classes in the Paris region. Even on that measure, the balance is far off. Only Ginette and Louis-le-Grand go above 40%.
This shapes the distribution: more than half of the students from outside Paris counted in these eight lycées study at Sainte-Geneviève or Saint-Louis.
2. Girls
Results are more even here: between 25 and 30% almost everywhere, with Saint-Louis ahead at 37%. These shares match the targets set by several grandes écoles, which regret that women are ten to fifteen points less represented in their intakes.
Saint-Louis dominates the distribution, mostly because of the size of its classes (twice as large as Stanislas's, for example).
3. Scholarship holders
Rates are much lower in private prépas this time (under 2% at Stanislas, 3% at Ginette), to be compared with the share of scholarship holders among applicants. Henri IV leads on this measure with 12% scholarship holders (among new baccalauréat graduates).
The grandes écoles want more scholarship holders in their intakes. They will not get there without first opening up access to prépa, and extra points at the exams will not on their own lead to sufficient or fair results. In fairness, such a measure would not upend the rankings given the numbers involved.
