France’s top engineering university features in the latest instalment of Beyond Boundaries, an interview series by City University of Hong Kong
For more than 200 years, Institut Polytechnique de Paris has educated some of the best minds and leaders of society. But the institution is facing new challenges as it seeks to expand both research output and student numbers in keeping with market demands.
For the sixth episode of the second season of Beyond Boundaries, an interview series produced by City University of Hong Kong (CityU), the university’s president Way Kuo met with Institut Polytechnique de Paris president Eric Labaye to learn more.
CityU is an international university that emphasises the integration of research and teaching. Kuo has served as the institution’s president for more than a decade, and is well known for his own research and leadership in the field of engineering.
Meeting with Labaye, Kuo commented that “higher education in France has evolved into a new phase”. Until recently, many French universities have been small and selective. “They were known for their research but not so much on a broader scale,” Labaye explained.
“The idea now is to [become] more visible by combining great education with great research,” he said, following the way of “the classic global university” while maintaining and leveraging “French strengths”.
In doing so, the university aims to “provide solutions to some of the most difficult problems on Earth”, Labaye said.
The Institut Polytechnique de Paris is a research university system consisting of five engineering schools. The institute has 8,040 students and 1,300 academic staff, and encompasses 30 laboratories dedicated to different research areas, including environment and climate, artificial intelligence and data science.
Over the past decade, the university has expanded to become more global. Today, 44 per cent of the student population, and 41 per cent of faculty members, come from outside France, making it the country’s most international higher education institution.
“We are very proud of that because it is a way to get the best of the world to come here, but also to expose our students to many cultures on our campus,” said Labaye.
The institute is renowned for its start-up culture and boasts its own start-up incubator on campus, through which students attend classes on innovation by alumni who have found success in these fields.
As part of the France 2030 plan, the French government has identified 10 technologies it wants to develop with public funding over the coming years. However, Labaye acknowledged, higher education institutions would need to increase their collaborations with industry to secure private income and support on top of that.
“There is no silver bullet. We have to work on all axes – from the government to alumni to private companies and philanthropy,” he said. “Our mission is to double our financial base over the next 10 years.”
Kuo commented that there was a “trend away from the ivory tower” tradition of learning towards “marketability of graduates who are more relevant to society”.
“We are thinking about what will be required in 2030, because we want to be ready,” Labaye said. “When we think about climate change [for example] we may have half of the tech solutions known to us today. We need to find the next 50 per cent; universities should be at the core of that,” he concluded.
Find out more about CityU’s Beyond Boundaries series.
