Cédric Villani: mathematician challenging to be Paris mayor
ft.com
ft.com
Edit: fixed "dommageable".
Can you go into detail about what his party has voted for that's so bad for higher education and research?
I consider myself pretty academia-friendly, and there's a lot of things I'd vote for that most people would consider damaging to higher education and research.
For example, I think free college for everyone is a terrible idea. Most people consider that heresy.
A terrible idea from what perspective? I'd love to hear more! (I'm on the other side of the spectrum)
I think the idea that someone can get straight C's in highschool and get $50k a year to study art in college is not a good use of my tax dollars.
I also don't think it's a good idea to give someone like me a free college education. I make $400k a year. I can pay for it my fucking self if I want to. The idea someone else should pay for it seems absurd.
Further, some of the most expensive schools are some of the worst schools. I don't think we should be paying an unlimited amount of money for the same education. If the University of Pittsburgh can deliver results much better than USC (I'm not saying it can, this is a hypothetical) -- I don't think you should be able to get $70k a year to go to USC when you can study the same thing with better results at Pittsburgh for $20k.
All that being said, I think it's a phenomenal use of my tax dollars to train someone to be a doctor or an engineer or a lawyer (etc), who's demonstrated an interest in medicine (or something relevant) and has done well in high school -- especially if that person wouldn't otherwise be able to afford going to medical school (or law school or whatever). Especially if the tuition at that school isn't excessive, and people who graduate from it actually go on to get jobs as doctors and not baristas at Starbucks.
There's a lot of other things to consider as well -- is it just tuition we're covering? In Europe, most of the universities dorms and cafeterias aren't exactly 5-star hotels. Stanford's dorms can cost $2.5k per month for a swanky broom closet. I'm not sure it makes sense to pay for that. But I also think it's important to pay for room & board, because some people might really not be able to afford it, or will probably do worse in school if they have to work a full-time job to pay for room & board. I don't think it's a good investment to pay to put people in school and then set them up for failure.
Additionally, I think students should have SOME Skin in the Game. If college is 100% free, I'm not sure that creates the best incentives for the students. Maybe the government should pay for 80% and give you a low-interest loan for the other 20%. And maybe the max you can get is the minimum tuition of schools in the top 5% in your field of study. And maybe you get a stipend for room & board that is reasonable. That, I think would prevent a lot of potential abuses.
What if that person ends up being successful in that field ? Should we only have the kids of the rich do arts ? That seems to be what's going on in the US and you see the devastating cultural result.
> Additionally, I think students should have SOME Skin in the Game
You have skin in the game, because you need to feed yourself. The government paid for my studies, that doesn't mean I wasn't thinking "how will I have a roof over my head" afterwards.
> Stanford's dorms can cost $2.5k per month for a swanky broom closet. I'm not sure it makes sense to pay for that
Trust me, if they're focused on reducing costs, they won't cost 2.5k a month. French public (individual) dorms cost like 120e a month.
They don't cost 2.5k a month, and they aren't swanky broom closets. The average is ~1k, cheaper if you live with more people; this is below Palo Alto rent, mind you.
I believe the Stanford dorm experience is way better than that of most American institutions. For starters, every undergrad is basically guaranteed housing for the entirety of their college education, so no one is unwillingly ejected from university housing and forced to rent elsewhere (which is more expensive, as I already pointed out).
Not sure why gp decided to throw some random defamation at Stanford (might have been exaggerating to make a point, but it's not at all clear from the writing).
Disclosure: Stanford alum.
Why Art is not a good use of tax dollars? Who decides what is good or bad to study? Should only be the free market? I believe a cost of $50k/year/student is not optimal. I also think cost for education per student/year is much cheaper in Europe.
> I also don't think it's a good idea to give someone like me a free college education. I make $400k a year. I can pay for it my fucking self if I want to. The idea someone else should pay for it seems absurd.
It's hard to tell "a priori" if someone studying certain degree will make X amount of money. Because of that, I believe the balance is better adjusted after the fact of someone studying (meaning: paying taxes on salary once they get a job) than before (when studying).
> I don't think you should be able to get $70k a year to go to USC when you can study the same thing with better results at Pittsburgh for $20k
Completely agree. One of the issues that I see on the current system is that perhaps people start paying more for the connections that studying there will entail than for the education per-se.
> Additionally, I think students should have SOME Skin in the Game
Students should always have skin in the game. The question here is: should be mainly economical? There are a lot of other factors that can affect the status of someone that are not just about money. However I agree with you that perhaps a formula like 80%/20% might make sense. I believe that model is much closer to the one applied in Europe... and that model is actually closer to the concept of "free education" than anything else :) (at least, when viewed from the US prism)
The only lender that has benefitted from federal guarantees/subsidies for a number of years is...the US Department of Education. Whose lending is directed by the same laws that provide the guarantees and subsidies, and so are not incentivized by them.
With experience in both US and French universities, the only point I can agree with is "skin in the game." To me, the French students didn't seem to value the university experience as much because the cost wasn't explicit to them. Certainly, they were aware of the social contract whereby they worked hard and crammed for entrance exams, and then they would have high taxes in life and lower salaries than in liberal economies (the European term for US/UK freer markets). But in the everyday work I felt they didn't appreciate the effort and structure that they were benefitting from.
At the time I wondered if some symbolic 1000 Euro annual fee would make it more explicit. But if it were need based, it would just be another invisible subsidy to poorer students and just as invisible to richer students whose parents would pay it. And otherwise, it would just take away from the poorer students' housing and food budget, so I don't know the answer. It seemed to be more of a perception that needed adjusting, perhaps with a different attitude given by professors and administrators.
As a side effect it would almost certainly make American universities much leaner than the zero-risk loan-glutted monstrosities they are now, which also means more people could afford to go without a loan.
Education is the cement of the society, allowing anyone to have a chance to succeed in life whatever their social origin.
This is the European model. And when I see the current status of USA/UK student debt and USA Universities entrance fees: I tend to think it is a much more sane model than the American one.... even when I see my taxe bill.
Actually, I am not sure what its like in the United States. Are only the rich allowed to study art or theater?
It seems like a fantastic way to continue the income hardships your parents endured, even if college (and dorm) is free.
I am against an heavy discrimination of pricing/subsidizing based on major/area, but not because of the argument 'poor people wouldn't study art', that's a weak argument.
I know a few that are studying art or music and are definitly not wealthy. A former roommate studies music and her parents are old-school lower working-class. They know they're not going to make much money. They are doing it anyway. It's their life. Also, nobody knows whether they're a genius or not, it's harder to quantify than mathmatical abilities, at least in some areas. A lot of the art-students I know are fully aware of their prospects. I am currently taking some philosophy-seminars and the philosophy-majors are also not ignorant of the situation they're in.
An art-student I know recently married and it's going to be hard to raise kids because she's the only one that is going to make some money, at least consistenly. And she's a teacher, so it's also not much. We talked about it, it's not that he doesn't know.
Most of my friends are not doing something technical, or business-realted (art, music, literature) and I always feel lucky (or undeserving?) because I just don't have those existential problems while still doing something that I chose because I really wanted to. I have always chosen stuff because I had the inner drive to do it.
> but not because of the argument 'poor people wouldn't study art', that's a weak argument.
I think that's still a perfectly valid arguments, especially with art.
To finish my argument, I don't know how most of the would finance themselfs if they would have to heavily borrow money to study their subject. And I think society benefits heavily from them. They tour around giving concerts, organizing art-installations etc.
But in France all the good universities are the public ones, and they are all roughly the same price (e.g. the Bordeaux one is roughly 250€ per year for undegrads and 500€ per year for graduates -- or 15€ if you have a scolarship).
> I also don't think it's a good idea to give someone like me a free college education. I make $400k a year. I can pay for it my fucking self if I want to.
50% of the people in france make under the median salary which is around 20150€ post-tax per year. Most people "couldn't pay it for their fucking self" (and were you making 400k$ when you were 16 y.o. which is the age you could start university if you're quite good and skipped a class or two ?)
Let me add another point: There is a class of people who will never go to university - the real underclass whom 99% of people here have never met - instead they quit school at 15/16 to start working. The fact that these people then pay for some middle class yuppie's B.Art degree is outrageous.
Point 3 I think is a given, social aids should be given proportionally to the financial needs of each student. The fact that I paid almost the same as a child from a poor family as some of my friends did while being bankrolled by their parents is not normal.
Point 1 I agree but with caveats. The issue is that ROI is hard to estimate. If you just use "money" as the metric then you end up with only shallow education system where only the rich can afford to study the classics and everybody else has to be a good little drone. Money doesn't quantify social good, and an educated population is a good thing to have even if not everybody is an engineer. Maybe a set of scholarships should be set aside for the students willing to sacrifice themselves to fill that need, and the rest of the available funds be divided among people who have a career plan? It might cut down on the number of kids going into biology, psychology or business administration as a place holder until they figured out their life.
Point 2 is even harder because I was a barely passing high school student, but I now have a PhD in computer science and I teach in a Russell Group university in England - high school performance is a piss poor indicator of academic ambition, and should not be used as a proxy for it. My personal opinion is that conditioning funding on effort, rather than results, would be a better thing - show up to classes and do the work and the funding will keep coming even if you have a few setbacks here and there. That's already in place in our current funding system in France, but the administrative cost means that there is often a one year lag between the student completely slacking off and the CROUS cutting off their stipend.
Twitter is not a great reflection of real popularity. I highly doubt this is really that popular, especially when it comes to actually implementing and the real costs are considered.
It’s far easier to be hand wavy about this stuff in political campaigns than when it comes to policy and real life implications.
Especially given the highly questionable ROI we’ve seen with the large rise in people going to college and not finding work after. That plus the massive rise in tuition. This would have been way easier to pull off in the 70s than today.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Of course the issue is that free tuition has just been ruled to be a constitutional requirement and changing the constitution is a big hurdle.
English-language degree programs (thinking of other European countries) are a different story. There you end up with a situation that is more parasitic or exploitative.
I'm in the UK. Universities charge £10k+ a year to foreign students (US, Australia, etc do the same) and they have queues of them waiting to sign up. There are plenty of foreign students willing to pay thousands of euros a year and it is madness for France to subsidise them, then complain that universities lack resources.
Nothing prevents some of the money from being used to provide scholarships to bright foreign students who couldn't otherwise afford it.
This needs to be looked at with pragmatism. The position that tuition has to be free is ideological, not pragmatical.
1.) You don't provide any example how he damaged academia. It lacks substance.
2.) "he doesn't care at all about being a mathematician (well, except when it gives him credit he doesn't deserve)" That bit of character assassination is unnecessary. He is obviously one of the most accomplished Mathematicians alive.
2) The fact that he is one of the most accomplished mathematicians alive does not contradict the fact that it doesn't have anything to do with him doing politics, and that he doesn't do politics the way we could expect a member of academia would. That's what I meant: since he does not seem interested in research and higher education as a politician, it doesn't really count, on the politics side, that he is a member of academia.
The fact that Villani did not say anything about it and even supported the change says a lot of things on how he is now a politician and his mathematical background does not count anymore. I don't know of a single person with basic knowledge of algorithm who wouldn't be horrified by the design decisions in Parcoursup.
I don't live in Paris but I may be living there in the years to come.
However I'm sure you will enjoy your Parisian experience, despite all the inconvenience, Paris is still a beautiful city.
> Paris is becoming a big sleepy museum where only real Parisians do appreciate the lifestyle.
Funny they were saying this 10 years ago as well. Commerce has increased as companies exit the UK due to Brexit.
Probably he lived in the South, we don't go that far North :-)
Sorry you can't drive a 2-ton vehicle through one of the most dense cities in the world, that also has a very extensive public transportation system.
Maybe this is a good thing.
> restaurants are too expensing for the similar service and quality you can get in London
Is this something that a mayor can control? there are things such as minimal wages that can interfere with service prices on which a mayor has not influence.
That being said, I don't know if Villani will be a good mayor or not. But there are a few things I appreciate.
He is (as expected) very knowledgable in scientific and technological matters, and this is refreshing compared to other politicians who are clueless.
He had an international career. Most French politicians don't even speak English and have never worked in a foreign country.
I listened to him in an interview where he talked about ecology, energy and so on, and he was well-aware of the challenges we're facing.
Overall, he sounds like a reasonable, practical, person to me. Not overly ideological.
The odds that he can compensate by high grade mathematics are not good enough to me. I think he's gonna go depth first into tech/ideal solutions that nobody really want.
Most of these problems stem from national-level irresponsible policies such as uncontrolled immigration. They won't be fixed by the mayor alone, and they plague most big and even medium cities in the country.
The current mayor of Paris is also an interesting person, being a Spanish-born woman from a working class family. She has made huge strides in the greenification of Paris:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/05/world/europe/paris-anne-h...
Except for game theory maybe?
She closed a few roads and made them pedestrian-only; that was not well received by a number of people.
And it has been very well-received by a larger number of people, I guess. As for me, I would make the whole city pedestrian-only. Clarification: I live in banlieue and take the RER-B every day.
Lived in Paris for 20 years, everything is getting worse:
- Public transportation => many subway lines are saturated
- Traffic jams => stupid road and signals reworks (for cycling lanes mostly), it's a disaster, I am starting to think that about 90% of the population lives more than 5km from work and will never use a bicycle
- Security => cops have been in overtime for 5 years with Vigipirate & gilet jaunes and have no time for anything else
- Pollution => not a single cop around to enforce vehicles pollution laws, better hand parking tickets
Overall feels like a third world country where the state is losing control over everything.
Anyone younger and applying (scientifically) proven solutions could do.
source: http://www.leparisien.fr/paris-75/paris-perd-encore-des-habi...
That means public transport is working, Paris is one of the few big mature cities that invests heavily in new lines. (Not all of them make sense, but I guess that's politics)
Cars create traffic. Paris has been basically one traffic jam since 50 years, congestion pricing is what's needed, which she sadly is not pushing for, but which would create an even crazier absurd outcry than the closing of the berges (if that's possible).
The Paris Police Prefecture is under the Ministry of Interior, there slowly rolling out a much needed municipal police force.
Automatic enforcement of vehicle vignettes is not allowed yet, but will, from my understanding, be changed with the new mobility law.
Have you been to a country without working infrastructure and state with little power?
One of the problems is investing so much in public housing that could be used in better ways. So the debt of Paris has been rising quite sharply. At least the region (Ile de France) is actually building lots of housing compared to other big cities.
Basically, only super-rich, single households or very poor (only in designated neighborhoods, thanks to social housing) people can still afford to live there. Middle-class families with kids can't anymore.
I too would like to hear him say " ... you bring up the subject of housing in Paris and I'll tell you how I think about the problem: in mathematics we have a rather abstract concept called a Group ... ".
On the Fields Medal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp3sgYKULp0
On his wearing of decorative lapel spiders: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq4REVI30Qc
Beauty vs Utility: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xopM9BFjcNo
On his office: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeLpkCZkWfc
I find it unlikely he is clueless and very likely that he has incentives that we do not see.