Higher education must preoare for the demographic downturn – not be caught off guard!

School demographics predict a significant decline in primary and secondary school enrollment in the coming years. The medium-term consequences for the universities and their partners – first and foremost the regions, municipalities and EPCIs – could be detrimental if they are not anticipated.

Primary education is currently experiencing a marked decline, while secondary education is gradually decreasing.

In primary education, the figures predict a continuous decline in the number of pupils, from 6.29 million in 2024 to 6.06 million in 2027. This reduction will require local organizations to adapt before considering a review of the distribution of teachers, in the hope that the urgent desire to cut jobs in the short term does not short-circuit the coherent approaches of the regions and the teams of the departmental services of the Ministry of Education to deal intelligently with this demographic decline. Secondary education, on the other hand, is expected to experience a more gradual decline, with 30,000 to 40,000 fewer students per year from 2026, which is not insignificant but difficult to manage given the diversification of courses and support implemented in recent years in middle and high schools. These figures imply major organizational challenges, particularly in terms of maintaining the quality of education throughout the country.

Higher education: slowed growth and long-term decline

After strong growth of 670,000 students between 2011 and 2021, higher education is expected to slow down, followed by a projected decline of 4.78% by 2040, which could reach -12.2% by 2050. We can see that this trend tends to intensify the competition between institutions to attract students locally, nationally and internationally, and to recover the allocation of resources more or less proportional to the number of students, whether through the marketing of courses or the mobilization of operating subsidies. Parcoursup already shows us that there is sometimes overcapacity in the area. These tensions could increase in the coming years and threaten national cohesion if they crystallize in certain areas.

Reorganization and innovation to maintain access and quality in higher education

The medium-term decline in enrollment in higher education requires an intelligent reorganization of our collective educational resources. The blind application of the “fewer users, fewer budgets” equation, whether applied to spreadsheets at the national or local level, could damage social cohesion, which is already fragile. When amputation occurs, in medicine as in public finance, it is often because prevention has failed.

Strengthen the resilience of regional collaborations and build on existing positive momentum.

The partnership between universities and regions has been enriched in recent years by common strategic and budgetary frameworks. Most regions, even if there are localized problems, are benefiting from a twofold positive dynamic: on the one hand, the increasingly integrated approach of the main players in higher education within a territory, with models such as the EPE (public experimental establishment), and on the other hand, the deconcentration of higher education services, with renewed investment in local branches or relay centres, which make it possible to limit the isolation of certain territories in terms of access to higher education. Anticipating demographic decline should make it possible to maintain these complementary dynamics, one resulting from national public policies favoring the creation of international university centers, the other from the efforts of local decision-makers and operators to meet the needs of local public services expressed in pain during the health, economic and political crises we are currently experiencing.

Safeguarding teaching capacities through innovation

The key to guaranteeing access to higher education and its quality – the main resource – remains the number of effective teaching hours available in the budgets of the institutions: innovation should focus on this scarce and strained commodity, innovation should make it possible to develop leverage effects from these teaching hours, innovation should make it possible to avoid their contamination by ancillary activities, for example of an administrative nature. Without miracle cures or alchemy, technological innovation makes it possible to improve the deployment of public services in the territory, as demonstrated by telepresence applied to medicine through an “approximate principle of teleportation”: a health professional can practice in several places at the same time, physically and virtually thanks to telemedicine booths. The digital tools at the disposal of France Services agents do not make them omniscient in administrative matters, but they can welcome, reassure, guide and develop the autonomy of users while promoting the versatility of teams in the field. The recent setbacks experienced by certain manufacturers of telemedicine cabins (H4D, a company specializing in the management of cable cars, has been placed in judicial liquidation) have taught us that public policies to improve access to public services must be comprehensive and sometimes include an industrial component, and that these policies must evolve according to a universal principle of trial and error. As far as France Services is concerned, the positive feedback, which has increased recently, is being expressed almost 15 years after the first experiments. If we want to generalize systems such as telepresence in higher education or digital tools that allow teachers to limit the impact of administrative tasks on their teaching time, we need to anticipate.

We must start now to anticipate the milestones of 2027 and the demographic turnaround that will follow.

The current period is conducive to starting anticipatory work to prepare the SRESRI, CPER and other plans for 2027, including the renewal of the Horizon Europe program. There are now some interesting models for the organization and regional delivery of public education services, combining for example a central hub of shared services and often specialized local branches, which have been able to take advantage of the strategic and budgetary progress made in recent years. Moreover, the major technological advances we are witnessing, such as artificial intelligence and cutting-edge immersive environments, are on the doorstep of universities, and current experiments could be scaled up. The expected demographic decline is not an inevitability; it should be used as an opportunity to maintain these positive dynamics and not undermine territorial cohesion in higher education.

Julien Llanas