End of égalité? France bids adieu to low fees for international students

For years, an international student could enrol at a French public university for about €180 (£150) a year, the same amount as domestic students. But starting this autumn, most non-European Union (EU) students will have to pay tuition fees in the thousands. 

In a major shift, the French government announced in April that it would begin strictly enforcing its differentiated fees policy, which was first introduced seven years ago. Many students from outside the EU would have to pay tuition fees that are more than 16 times higher than those they were currently paying, starting in the 2026-27 academic year. 

“Differentiated fees are now the rule, exemption is the exception,” higher education minister Philippe Baptiste declared in Le Parisien. 

The move was met with a strong backlash in a country that has long defined higher education as a public good. Equal access is a core republican ideal, yet public universities sit within a two-tier system that also includes the elite grandes écoles, selective institutions with significantly higher fees. 

Less than a month after the announcement, the government softened its approach. Initially, universities were allowed to exempt only 10 per cent of their non-EU students from paying the higher fees, but a draft decree has since raised that threshold, allowing universities to exempt 30 per cent of non-EU students in the next academic year, falling to 25 per cent in 2027, before settling at a cap of 20 per cent. 

Despite the changes, opposition has continued and the debate around tuition fees remains deeply loaded. Some in French academia fear that charging international students more is only the beginning, and that domestic students could eventually face higher fees too. It is a sensitive question in a country that has long believed universities should be affordable for everyone, even as that model comes under increasing pressure across Europe. 

Critics argue that the latest move will price out students from disadvantaged backgrounds and undermine France’s ties with the francophone world, particularly across Africa, where the country has spent years actively recruiting international students. “We will not have better students, we will have wealthier students,” said Anne Fraïsse, president of Paul-Valéry University, Montpellier 3. 

The government insists the policy is long overdue. French public universities are highly dependent on state budgets and most are operating at a deficit. Ministers argue higher fees are a necessary financial injection that will make universities more competitive globally while still leaving France significantly cheaper than other popular destinations for higher education. 

The policy is part of the country’s wider Bienvenue en France (Welcome to France) ambition, which aims to attract 500,000 international students by 2027. Ministers have framed higher fees as a way of funding a better experience for those who come. The measure is expected to generate an extra €250 million a year for public universities, which are facing a severe financial crisis. University leaders have repeatedly warned that institutions are struggling to maintain teaching and research standards. 

Under the changes, undergraduate students who have not been exempted will pay about €2,895 per year, while fees for master’s students will increase from €254 to €3,941. Doctoral students will continue to pay €397. 

Léonard Moulin, a researcher at the Institut national d’études démographiques who has studied tuition fees in France, said academic literature showed there was an immediate drop in enrolments after countries introduced or raised fees for international students. 

“A similar effect can be expected in France. Potentially even larger, given the profile of France’s non-EU student population,” he said. “Over 60 per cent of non-EU students in French universities come from Africa, a region with substantially lower household incomes, making this population particularly price-sensitive.”

The impact, he added, would not be felt equally. More selective institutions tend to attract wealthier, internationally mobile students. But universities that enrol a higher share of students from lower-income countries are “likely to be most severely affected”, he said.

It may appear as though France has moved suddenly toward adopting higher university fees, but the changes have been gradual, occurring over many years through small and carefully chosen steps. Moulin pointed to an influential government-commissioned report in 2004 that recommended against sweeping reform in favour of “limited experiments that would gradually normalise fee-paying, without triggering mass resistance”. 

The grandes écoles were the testing ground. In 2004, Sciences Po introduced a sliding-scale tuition system tied to family income, a reform made politically easier by its already elite status. Paris Dauphine University followed. 

“Sciences Po in 2004, then Paris Dauphine, then [other] grandes écoles, then the 2019 differentiated fees for non-EU students,” Moulin said. “Enforcing the 2019 policy is not a stand-alone decision, it is the next step in a long-term trajectory aimed at eventually extending fees to all students.”

Others argue that France’s traditional model is simply no longer viable in a globalised market. In a recent paper from the Policy Institute at King’s College London, Christian Gollier, director of the Toulouse School of Economics, wrote that French universities were hamstrung by a “moral taboo on higher tuition fees” that leaves them unable to pay competitive salaries or invest in research infrastructure. 

“As all international rankings have been showing for years, France has fallen far behind in the globalized higher education market,” he wrote.  

Young lecturers in France, after a decade of postgraduate training and several years as a postdoc, earn a gross annual salary of about €30,000, he pointed out, adding that the best universities in the world can offer five to 10 times that amount to recruit the same candidates.

“Given the state of our public finances, tuition-free education eliminates the only real option for funding competitive salaries for teaching and research staff,” he said, adding in the paper that a “mental paralysis” comes over French universities when their best researchers choose “the wonderful world of major Anglo-Saxon universities”. 

Non-EU students are already feeling the impact of the policy, which was first introduced in 2019. Most universities did not fully apply it in practice. Some did charge the higher fees to non-EU students, but many either applied it only in certain cases or used wider exemptions and scholarships to reduce its impact.

Mame Diakhere Ndiaye, president of the Federation of Senegalese Students and Trainees in France, said the impact of differentiated tuition fees was already visible in universities that had previously chosen to apply them. Some students had abandoned their original study plans altogether in order to avoid the higher costs. Others changed courses entirely, moving away from more demanding programmes such as law or medicine toward programmes that were easier to combine with work.

Diakhere also criticised what she described as a contradiction between France’s efforts to recruit students abroad and the higher fees they now face. She pointed to the role of Campus France, the state agency that promotes French higher education internationally, particularly across Africa. 

“Campus France is really implanted in Africa,” she said. “Then changing the [conditions] and telling the students ‘you are not going to have a fee exemption’ felt unfair to many students,” she said. Some students accepted into French universities before the latest changes were announced were now discovering they may no longer qualify for exemptions. She added that it was also unfair to make international students pay to cover the financial woes of universities. 

Times Higher Education contacted the French Ministry of Higher Education for an interview, but did not receive a response.  

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In the 2024-25 academic year, 443,500 foreign students were enrolled in French higher education institutions, about 15 per cent of the total student population. Most students came from Morocco, followed by Algeria, China, Italy and Senegal. 

For many, France’s relatively low fees were a decisive factor in choosing to study there. At Fraïsse’s university, Paul-Valéry University, Montpellier 3, about 21 per cent of students come from outside France, many from francophone countries in Africa – Algeria, Morocco, Benin, Senegal – where the promise of an affordable French education has long carried particular weight. 

The university refused to implement the policy in 2019. University president Fraïsse described the latest move as a “commodification of higher education and the abandonment of the defence of the Francophonie”. 

“[Low fees are a] social measure towards students who cannot afford to pay high fees and to preserve our ties with French-speaking countries in situations of poverty,” she said. 

Forthcoming fee hikes would not, however, necessarily make France less competitive than other European countries, said Fraïsse, noting how competitor countries would still have much higher tuition fees for international students. 

Several other European countries have experimented with raising tuition fees in recent years. In Germany, for example, public universities remain mostly tuition-free for both domestic and international students. Students are typically required to pay a small semester fee to cover administrative costs.

In the mid-2000s, however, seven of the country’s 16 federal states broke with that tradition and introduced fees of roughly €500 per semester. The move triggered mass protests and sustained political opposition. The Social Democrats and the Left Party successfully blocked fees in Berlin, and other states followed. Within a decade, every state had reversed course. 

Germany’s experience illustrates how deeply held the principle of free higher education can be, and how difficult it is to dislodge it once embedded in a country’s political culture. 

Meanwhile, Norway, which had long offered free tuition to all students including those from outside the EU, introduced fees for students from outside the European Economic Area and Switzerland in 2023. The number of new students from outside the EEA and Switzerland subsequently dropped by about 80 per cent. Two years after introducing the fees, the government revised the policy. Norwegian universities can now set their own tuition fees. 

Rachel Brooks, professor of higher education at the University of Oxford, whose research focuses on international student mobility across Europe, sees France’s move to increase fees as part of a Europe-wide trend that signals a broader shift towards the marketisation of higher education across the continent. “It’s linked to increased financial pressures on universities. [Raising fees] is seen as a way of increasing revenue,” she said. 

Marketisation takes different forms in different countries. In the UK, it has meant decades of rising fees and an increasingly stratified sector. In Germany, where public universities have held the line on fees, it has manifested instead in deliberate efforts to create greater differentiation between institutions in terms of their status. “Fees are part of a broader picture, and there has been an increasing willingness to charge students individually for the education they are receiving,” she said. 

“France is the country that has been most resistant to that market mechanism, thinking that it’s important that higher education is perceived as a public good and that fees are a slippery slope towards marketisation,” she explained. 

Across Europe, negative attitudes toward migration are also increasingly bleeding into debates about international students. “There is a sense of wanting to reduce the number of international students, or at least to show the domestic audience that they are not subsidising international students to such a degree,” said Brooks. 

THE reached out to France Universités, an organisation that represents university leaders, and six public universities for a request for comment. 

The University of Toulouse, the University of Strasbourg, and France Universités did not respond to a request for comment. Panthéon-Sorbonne University – Paris 1 refused an interview, saying it “does not wish to comment further at this time” because “the university has already extensively commented on this topic” in French media. 

Others said they would comment once details about the policy had firmed up. 

Sebastian Stride, founding partner of SIRIS Academic, a non-profit consulting firm working with universities across Europe, said the debate had become too polarised to produce real answers. “It immediately gets framed as, should higher education be free for all, or fee-based?” he said. 

University leaders who privately support fee increases are often reluctant to say so publicly, he added, for fear of being accused of not being socially progressive. “A lot of university leaders agree that there is a problem with financing higher education, that’s very clear,” he said. “French universities need more funding to be competitive on a global stage.” 

But the harder question, he said, was who should pay. Should non-EU students be charged differently from their French and European peers? Should fees rise for everyone? Or does the answer lie in a more robust scholarship system?

“I think these debates are not present enough,” Stride said.

seher.asaf@timeshighereducation.com