
Can France Create Its Own MIT? - sndean
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/06/28/france-considers-plan-create-university-mit
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coldtea
What arrogance and ignorance.

France has its own MIT, it's called École Polytechnique. There's also INRIA
and other institutions...

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JumpCrisscross
> _France has its own MIT, it 's called École Polytechnique_

Is EP’s productivity (in terms of companies founded by, landmark
inventions/discoveries made by or patents awarded to) comparable to MIT? I
thought it was more geared towards producing future politicians.

~~~
da-bacon
Per alumni, it has the same rate of Nobel prize winners as MIT
[https://www.nature.com/news/where-nobel-winners-get-their-
st...](https://www.nature.com/news/where-nobel-winners-get-their-
start-1.20757)

~~~
sytelus
This is a good measure: divide number of Nobel winners by total student
population. By that standard, EP seems to be top ranked. The problem is that
the last EP student who won the prize was enrolled in 1960s. Many other
winners were all the wY back in 1800s. It seems that EP was one of the best
institute before WW II but then something happened and things went downhill.
This could be great case study.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_École_normale_supéri...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_École_normale_supérieure_people#Nobel_laureates)

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gtycomb
What! The land that gave the world Fourier, Poincare, Galois, Laplace, Pascal,
Lagrange, Cauchy, Descartes, Fermat, Hadamard, Borel ... they had their MIT a
long time earlier.

~~~
adventured
Which is meaningless in the present. Just ask Greece how valuable to your
present circumstances basking in the very, very distant past is.

Australia has none of that immense legacy, due to the age of their nation. And
yet Australians are already richer than the French at the median, along with
having a far higher GDP per capita. The impressive history of France doesn't
matter very much in the scope of most practical matters related to the
present.

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DoofusOfDeath
> Which is meaningless in the present. Just ask Greece how valuable to your
> present circumstances basking in the very, very distant past is.

Slightly off-topic, but for some reason I've run into a seemingly
disproportionate (in terms of world population) number of good computer
scientists who were born in Greece.

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tnecniv
A Greek professor told me that when he started his PhD (in the US) his Greek
advisor told him as a Greek in America his two options were to become a
control theorist or open a diner.

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gumby
They are missing an important structural point: MIT isn't really a school,
it's a huge government research lab with a small school attached (look at the
budget for which education is about 14% of revenues and 16% of expenditures).
Research is primary (whereas, as some other comments have noted, it has
atrophied in the French Grandes Écoles). They need another INRIA in the mix --
though not INRIA itself; that excellent institution would not survive merging
with these others.

FWIW I am an MIT graduate who has lived and worked in research in the USA and
France

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sddfd
France already has an excellent research system, and the phrase "create its
own MIT" is ambiguous at best: This is mainly about branding to increase
international visibility of the institutions.

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aurizon
France has a problem with long lived institutions - they get filled with
"union tenured" staff and new work suffers. I have heard that the French are
well aware of this problem and when they establish an institution they set the
budget and longevity for it. At the end of that time it is shut down and all
the released people must find new jobs based on their merits. A long process
to get rid of dead wood, which in the USA would be long gone.

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acoye
Actually MIT was modelled from the French "École Polytechnique". In a same way
like the white house was a copy of "Château de Rastignac".

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ninguem2
Why isn't the ENS part of this? The best math and science students go there.

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fiduciary
Guess Ecole Poly is good enough. Is ENS more like the Harvard/Oxford, and EP
more like the MIT/Cambridge of France? This would be my layman reading of the
situation, charitably not invoking politics.

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occamrazor
EP and ENS are both excellent schools. I am a mathematician and mathematics is
more traditionally associated with ENS than with EP, but I've met excellent
mathematicians, at all level of career (from PhD student to full professor)
from both schools.

My impression is that all the French Grandes Ecoles are trying to expand their
range of activities and subjects, reducing the level of diversification.

~~~
nolok
Well I guess "more traditionally associated" is one way to put it, but... 11
out of France's 12 fields medal came from people who studied at ENS. The only
other country to even have 11 or more fields medal is the USA at 13. They
literally exude math competency.

~~~
makapuf
Having been in the selection in grande ecoles - and having been in one of
those myself - EP is definitely a school of engineers and ens a school of
researchers/professors. All of our teachers were from ens. Not that there
aren't researchers in so or my own grande ecole but I have seen people refuse
to go to ep to attempt and the next year. But those schools really are top
notch, each in their own way.

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jacquesm
It can't, it shouldn't and it definitely does not have to.

France is doing just fine in terms of research in many fields.

Those that would like France to produce an 'MIT' would also like Europe to
produce the next Facebook and neither is going to happen.

But that doesn't mean things are bad, they're just different and no less
valuable.

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nickpeterson
Out of curiosity, why is this true? Why does it seem like so many relevant
tech companies are American, yet I see tons of talented European developers
and conferences all the time? Are Euro nations just hostile to startups in a
way the US isn't?

~~~
jacquesm
> Why does it seem like so many relevant tech companies are American

The ones that are relevant to _you_.

To me all but very few of the relevant tech companies are irrelevant, and the
miracle of Silicon Valley has not been replicated inside the USA either. So
the reason those companies are American is because SV is in the United States,
it has little to do with America as a whole, if it did then Silicon Valley
would not be an exception within the United States.

Euro nations as a rule are not hostile to start-ups in any way that is
different from say Texas or Michigan.

Then, finally, there _are_ a large number of relevant EU tech start-ups. They
are working from a slight disadvantage (need to market/sell immediately in a
whole bunch of languages if they want to escape their home-territory) but
plenty of them do well enough that they end up listed on stock-exchanges all
over the planet.

That they are not relevant to you is another matter, but IT companies account
for a huge percentage of EU employment and they're all doing stuff that they
feel is relevant.

So it looks as if your argument mostly revolves around what you think is
relevant and what isn't.

The only American company I can't seem to get around is Google, and they're a
one-off even by US standards.

Apple, FB, MS, Twitter and so on can all be done without (at least: I could do
without them).

On the hardware front that leaves Intel and AMD, neither of which could be
classed as start-ups today any more than you could class Siemens or Sony as
one.

~~~
nickpeterson
You're right they don't seem relevant to me, but I can acknowledge some things
are not relevant to me but are still important. Take Baidu for instance, I get
I'll never likely use it, but that doesn't mean I don't acknowledge its
importance. Looking at software vendors in the EU, there doesn't seem to be
any companies that offer a service I would ever want. There are a few large
ERP vendors, and some Anti-virus firms, and what?

Seriously, this isn't meant to be mean, I just don't know any of them. There
seems to be an unlimited array of talented euro engineers on twitter talking
about specialized type systems and exotic data models and theoretical comp sci
and then a net nothing on the software front. Do they all just leave and work
in SV?

This is one of those cases where I would love someone to come in and set me
right. I'd much rather a world where there is a huge amount of cool things
happening that I'm unaware of, rather than just MS, Apple, and Google sucking
all the engineers from their countries to Silicon Valley.

~~~
jacquesm
TomTom TeamViewer Skype Adyen Takaway.com Zalando Hellofresh and many many
more...

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tormeh
Honestly sounds too big.

Isn't a bit of the appeal of elite institutions that they put elite people in
close proximity to each other? Adding a lot of padding* in between them would
make it harder for them to find and get to know each other.

*I am fully aware that in this context I am considered padding

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rurban
I'll take any EP hacker over any MIT hacker. They are just better. Anyone
heard of OCAML, compilers, netsec or security engineering? That's where they
are better.

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3D13158219
I doubt it. Laboratories which teach and work in English have a huge advantage
in modern academia because they are able to draw in talent from a far larger
pool.

The majority of international academics working in France are from other
Romance language countries. I presume the other Romance language countries
have the same problem as France.

~~~
hevi_jos
French is an extremely easy language to pick for someone who already speaks
English.

In fact, English took from French over 30% of its vocabulary. French was the
official language in England of the highly educated until mere centuries ago.

Most researchers in France already speak English.

The huge advantage of the US/UK is one: money, you could become rich and apply
your ideas to real products(in a bigger market) much much more easily than in
France.

The huge advantage of France: quality of life.

~~~
jacquesm
And _much_ less pressure to commercialize, there is a lot of fundamental and
other research that is not immediately aimed at generating a cash-cow
somewhere.

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elcomet
CentraleSupelec is France's best attempt to match MIT (more than 1000 students
each year). It was formed from the merger of Centrale Paris and Supelec
schools.

And it's a unique school, not like this merger: it's a reunion of several
schools that want to keep their independance. I think it'll be harder for them
to act in coordination to achieve their goals.

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sneakware
No 42 in the list, sad

~~~
bsaul
42 doesn't have anything close to those schools regarding general science
curriculum. No serious maths, no chemistry or physics , no engineering. It's a
very good school if you want to learn to code in 3 years, but let's not make
it anything else...

