There’s a young woman I know in west London who, having bagged excellent A-levels, chose to study in France. While all her friends, similarly qualified, went off to various redbrick British universities, she picked a fashion school in Paris. To my shame, I must admit I thought it all sounded a bit, you know, Mickey Mouse. How wrong I was.
I also happen to know a few of this woman’s friends, who, naturally, were keen to go and pay her a visit. Never mind Reading, Newcastle, Bristol, Nottingham, wherever. Paris! With a friend studying fashion! What a ball. But word started to reach me of the disappointments of these jaunts. The problem? “Well,” one of them told me, “she has to leave for college at nine and doesn’t get back until six. She’s there all day. And she has to go in or she gets into trouble. We hardly saw her.”
There was much shaking of heads at what had befallen their friend. A place of learning where you were taught stuff all day, every day? And were failed if you didn’t learn it? And actually had to turn up? They’d heard of such harsh higher education practices in subjects like medicine, but nothing quite like this. And there was more to come when she was home for Christmas. She had so much homework to do she could hardly go out partying, much to the dismay of her friendship group, who were naturally keen to show off the skills they’d learned in their first term.
In the breaks between getting her work projects, our Parisian fashion student managed to do a bit of socialising. From her redbrick mates she heard many tales of sparse timetables and limited contact hours. One of them described her seminars as “a PhD student sitting around getting bored while 10 of us argue for an hour”. At first, she was envious of both their unchallenging workloads and extremely challenging social schedules. But the last time I saw her, she said she was concluding her friends were being short-changed. Her terms add up to nearly 40 weeks a year. Compare this with any UK student’s schedule. No month or more off at Eastertime for her; she gets two weeks, then it’s straight through to early July.
