On raising in the Shanghai index, it's bullshit only if you don't want to compete. Sure the metrics can be discussed but the impact of the low rank is very much here: top researchers abroad won't even hear about french labs and won't feel it will further their career compared to a serious university in the middle of Japan who invested to fit the metric.
Another thing that I always feel when I hear those grumpy french rambles is that it's absolute, as if time didnt change things and situations were eternal. What's wrong with adapting and trying and reverting if it doesnt work then try something else ? Doing nothing or whining at every attempt to solve a problem will just lead to...nothing.
As a non-french national living in France since 2011, I don't follow you. I'm paying the same taxes as my french colleagues, and I'm very happy about that.
I think it's not how it works. Researchers in a given field know each other. They will choose to collaborate based on personal reputation and scientific affinity, rather than the shanghai ranking of their institution.
Concerning Shanghai index: what if I don't want to compete? The model of small French universities was good enough even for elitist standards such as international awards. It produced as much Medal Fields as the entire US system. It produced a lot of Nobel Prizes in a variety of disciplines. And most of them will tell you: in the current system where they would have had to spend months and months each year to look for funding instead of doing actual research, where they would have had a series of short term contracts working on different projects in their early career, and then would be forced to recruit collaborators on the same kind of short term contracts, they simply wouldn't have been able to conduct the research that lead them to the award.
Finally, I think you should pay attention to what it seems you don't want to hear when you listen to "grumpy french rambles". Your analysis is ridiculous. It's not the problems that are denied, it's wrong solutions. Take Parcoursup as an example. The problem is: there are more and more students coming to universities due to a baby boom starting in 2000, and there is not enough places at universities to have them. It's not like it wasn't easy to see it coming. Those kids went through the whole school system before arriving at uni. But instead of preparing for it by recruiting more professors, by building new universities if necessary (or at least new buildings), the governments decided to just wait and let the situation rot. Once it was a mess, they used it to push their political agenda of adding a selection step to enter university in addition to the one we already have which is the Baccalauréat. The new thing is: this selection step is not Nation-wide, it's done with varying criterion (which are typically not known by candidates) uni by uni, department by department. In addition to that the Parcoursup platform which runs all that is an algorithmic mess leading to deadlock (like a candidate A who prefers uni X over Y and a candidate B who prefers uni Y over X but uni X ranks B before A and uni Y A before B so A and B both wait to see if a spot will be freed at their most wanted uni but they depend on the other first giving up their place there, which won't happen because they don't know that they can safely do that) all that because they imposed stupid design conditions just so it is different from the previous system which used Gale-Shapley algorithm to solve these situations…
So sorry but no, it's not that it's wrong to "adapt and trying and reverting if it doesn't work". It's just plain wrong to do stupid things that do not solve the actual problems, especially when we can know in advance that they won't. I'm absolutely not for doing nothing (although in the Parcoursup case, nothing would have been better), I'm for doing what is actually necessary to solve problems that exists.
Offtopic but I wonder, where does this notion come from?
Biologically there is more variance in the humans species than in others species that we consider to having races. One example of big phisical distinction is themarathon winner's race, most modern marathon winners descend from the same tribes, and have very distinct physiology due to millenia of adapting to persistence hunting. Literally evolution.
My definition of racism was always: race based discrimination. Aa in I should not treat you different because of your race. The definition about denying even the existence of different human races seems weird to me, as there seem to be a lack evidence to support the inexistence of different human races.
Hopefully you won't need a bone marrow transplant anytime soon.
You are right, it's pure bullshit and heavily favors big institutions rather than small ones which does mean that French style grande écoles are penalized but the solution isn't to conform to it but instead to change the way universities is ranked.
I have also been very disappointed with Macron's policies when it comes to education. The higher tuition for foreigners is also I believe a mistake since it is good for a country when highly educated foreigners come to study there. France is at a disadvantage when attracting foreign talents due to the language barrier but could compensate for it thanks to the low tuitions. Now with those changes, it will become harder and diminish the cultural influence that France had. Not a good long term move.
Also, I'm not surprised that tuition for foreigners is a lever they are pulling. A government is responsible, first and foremost, to its own citizens. Racism? Really? What about "localism" or "separation of duties"?
Raising the price of tuition will mostly impact people from these countries rather than people from other European or American countries.
Since you can't make a selection of candidates with an entrance exam or by looking on grades, what do you do when too many students want to join the same university curriculum? That's what Parcoursup is for. Students put in their wishes, and some algorithm decides who goes where regardless of their grades. The algorithm uses a bunch of criteria and is pretty complex to understand. At some point they had to release the source code to be transparent, and it was a mess.
What the current government did is introduce grades into the system, so students who have better grades in the subjects relevant to the curriculum have better chances to get it. In a way it makes sense, but it also goes against the old principle that everyone is entitled to knowledge and can enroll in any curriculum - get a chance to succeed even if it wasn't their major in high school.
With the previous system, APB (Admission Post-Bac), candidates ordered their wishes, and a bunch of (known, public) criteria were used to rank students in each of the curriculum they enter in their wishes. There criteria included, among other things and as the most important factor the position of the curriculum in the candidate ordered wishlist. So if a candidate placed a curriculum at the top of their wishlist, the particular curriculum will prefer this student over one who placed it in the third position for example.
Now, with the new system, Parcoursup, two main things changed.
The first thing: curriculum have to manually order candidates according to whatever criteria they want. Universities are given access to grades and high school of the candidates. This can lead to (sometimes unconscious) discrimination (candidate from a prestigious high school is more likely to get what they want compared to someone who went to a suburb high school, for example). This is already stupid. The fact is also that candidates do not know the criteria in advance, and that the criteria may differ (and trust me, they do!) depending on each university and curriculum. Grades now may be a part of the selection, but they do not have to. And there is no way to really know if they do and if so, how.
This is a nightmare for candidates (and their parents).
The second thing: candidates can no longer order their wishes. This is really, reaaaaaaally, plain stupid. And it is what can lead to deadlock as I explained in another comment. It is no longer possible to apply an optimal pairing algorithm such as stable marriage (Gale-Shapley, of which a variant was used by APB). So the professors managing each curriculum have to manually set the number of candidate they call in their ordered list. If your department has 100 places for new students, then you might call the top 200 of your candidate local ranking at first, knowing that some of them with strong application will also be called somewhere else (because they most likely have a strong application there too) and they might prefer to go there. Now what happens when you have say 70 confirmed wishes and you are left with 50 candidates waiting. If they are waiting, it's most likely because they would like another university better than yours, but they can't let your offer go as long as they are not sure that this other university offers them a place. And in this other university, the situation is the same, with other people who may prefer to go to your university. And there we have a deadlock. A completely stupid deadlock that would be avoidable trivially if candidates could simply order their wishes.
This leads to even more stress for candidates and their family because it often takes up month before the situation is little by little solved by candidate settling for their second or third choice while it would have been possible to make everyone more happy way more quickly.
About the tuition for foreigner, very few university applied it, and it has been declared unconstitutional by the "conseil constitutionnel" (it's kind of the french supreme court).
Now, what Macron's government did wrong with research and higher education is: literally everything they did about it. The switch to high tuition as you said (especially given that it was only for foreigners, which I consider racist, and anyway the Conseil Constitutionnel recently found this measure unconstitutional). Parcoursup was a very bad decision: it is poorly designed, it is much worse than the previous system for university admissions for obvious algorithmic reasons that my undergrad students can spot (but that Villani apparently can't?), and it also does not solve the actual problem which is the lack of universities and professors. There is also the way they force universities to merge by making funding conditional to merger, this comes at high cost for no clear benefits (except for maybe jumping a _few_ places in the Shanghai university ranking, which is pure bullshit). There is the way they decided to fund public research: almost exclusively via calls for project, which is a very very inefficient wqy of distributing money as everyone has to work for month to make application and less than 10% of applicants are actually funded so more than 90% of all this work is done for next to nothing, and in addition to that the money is very badly distributed with very rich man that have so much money they don't even know how to spend it and a majority of labs where it becomes difficult to do any research at all. Their funding policy also force universities to cut there spending which is mostly salaries, meaning not replacing professors who retires for example, which means even less professors while there is more and more students (and that was forseeable, they all were born around two decades ago and have been through primary and middle and high school, we saw them coming). I could continue but I'm on my mobile phone so I will stop there.