In a tense social context, the Ministry of Higher Education reports in February the announcement of its project to reform the student scholarship system. “MO12345LEMONDE” was aware of measures envisaged to make it possible to reach more students from the middle classes at the start of the 2023 school year.
by soazig the nevé
Did the pension reform calendar come to strike that of student scholarship reform? Scheduled for the month of January, the first arbitrations of the Minister of Higher Education for the start of the 2023 school year will not be known until “in February”, indicates the entourage of Sylvie Retailleau, interviewed by MO12345lemonde. Other decisions must follow by the summer, for a “structural reform” by 2024 or even 2025, according to the initial course.
Impatient, student representative organizations are surprised not to have received at the start of the year “No news of the results of the concertation carried out since October [2022]”, reports Imane Ouelhadj, president of UNEF. “If the announcements were done as planned, no doubt there would be a risk of embraces of the social conflict caused by the pension reform?”, Suppute Eléonore Schmitt, national secretary of the alternative.
According to an internal document that MO12345lemonde has obtained, from consultations carried out since the fall by the academic Jean-Michel Jolion, a scenario is however already ready for the start of the 2023 school year, which consists of dusting of the dusting current allowance system. He still has to obtain the validation of Matignon, who will probably have preferred to play prudence, according to our sources, delaying its distribution to student representatives.
In this synthesis, the ministry acts that the number of scholarship holders on social criteria has recently experienced “strong decreases”, encrypted at “minus 20,000 between 2020 and 2021 and minus 50,000 between 2021 and 2022”. “A constant regulation, it is estimated at 8 % the number of scholarship holders in 2020-2021 which will no longer be eligible for scholarships for the university year 2024-2025, a new decrease of 60,000 beneficiaries”, underlines the ministerial document.
In question: the absence of updating, since 2013, of the reference scale for parents’ resources, which means that the scholarships partially lack their target by excluding an entire population from the middle classes, yet affected whip by the health crisis and by inflation.
potential increase in the amount of 10 %
By upgrading the parents’ reference scale by 13.9 % to comply with the revaluation of the minimum wage between 2011 and 2021, the ministry estimates the number of additional scholarship holders (+ 71 at 10 % (+ 71 000) at the start of the 2023 school year. In addition, 40 % of the current beneficiaries (288,000) would go to the higher level. Allied with a “linearization” of the eight scales of existing scholarships, so as to “modulate their amount according to the actual situation of the student”, the project would allow 662,000 scholarship holders (92 % of the total) to see their scholarships increase 10 % on average.
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