France takes the plunge into globalized education

PARIS: French universities, which used to see international students as optional, if fashionable, academic accessories, are beginning to see them as necessities for survival in an increasingly competitive world.

Admissions officers are looking for students who not only have the social and personal qualities that will enable them to thrive in an international environment, but who will be the means to internationalize and improve the social dynamics of the institutions themselves.

An example is the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris, also known as Sciences Po. Established in 1872, one of the most prestigious schools in the French university system and a cradle for French culture, Sciences Po has begun to catch on to the importance of foreign students as a way to "emphasize globalization within an intellectual context," said Jean-Claude Lescure, director of the institute's journalism school.

"It is a way to promote competition within forms of being and thinking," Lescure said. "Competition is a good way to improve — to be confronted with the foreigner in order to improve yourself."

Since 2000, all Sciences Po undergraduates have spent their third year of studies abroad, anywhere in the world from Bangkok to Canada; in turn the school accepts international students from 260 universities worldwide.

Of the journalism students in the first-year master's program, around one-third come from foreign countries, including Lebanon, Brazil, Spain, Cameroon, Germany, Belgium, Britain and the United States.

Sciences Po has adapted its admissions process slightly for international students — adding a French language test, for example, and exempting them from an oral and written examination by French professional journalists.

Still, "when accepted into the program they are here for two years, so they are to be evaluated and treated like any other student," Lescure said.

"The idea now is not to set a divide between the nationals and the foreigners, but to have a constant mix, all the time, and learn from each other as they discover different ways of looking at life."

João Manuel da Rocha Lima, from Rio de Janeiro, is one of the first-year journalism masters students at the school. After five months in Paris he said that his transition into a French education and lifestyle had proved more than challenging — highlighting differences that he first tried to ignore, before finally starting to accept, looking for positive sides to cultural diversity.

"When I first got here it was a complete culture shock until I started to learn from what I was trying to get away from, like the strict French punctuality rules," he said.

But, above all, he was "intrigued by the way the French do journalism; it's more analytical," said da Rocha Lima, who was an intern at TV stations in Brazil and freelances for magazines and newspapers back home.

Two years at Sciences Po will cost da Rocha Lima about the same as two years of undergraduate studies at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, where he earned a Bachelors degree in journalism.

Sciences Po has established a financial aid program for less affluent foreign students that can contribute as much as

To handle applications that come from all over the world, AUP has counselors who specialize in geographical areas, deciphering transcripts, establishing relationships with international schools abroad and communicating with the students.

Tornquist, 26 years old and an AUP graduate, focuses on admissions from Switzerland, Britain, Spain, Scandinavia, China and Brazil.

While the university uses the U.S. Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT, as its primary selection tool, it employs a system of weightings and point scores to take account of diversity in educational and cultural backgrounds, and to help allocate scholarship funding that can total as much as half of the