“With 43,000 students enrolled in French higher education in 2021, they will be the largest foreign student community, representing 20% of all foreign students,” explains the webzine on the Arab world, the Muslim world and the Middle East.
Among them,” continues the same source, “12% are studying engineering, an above-average proportion according to Campus France data.
The pursuit of a degree allows access to a high social status in Morocco, and its holder will be endowed with a strong value on an increasingly competitive Moroccan market, explains the French media.
Because of the colonial history that shaped the elites, many young Moroccans turn to French engineering schools, the same source adds, stressing that the French language serves as an instrument of choice and social progress.
In the same vein, OrientXXI estimated that the language of Molière has allowed those who mastered it to monopolise “fields of social practice whose stakes are related to the appropriation of material and symbolic capital”. “The distribution of functions between French and Arabic has, in the end, worked to the disadvantage of the latter, and it is paradoxically Arabisation that has increased the value of mastery of French by increasing its relative scarcity,” wrote the French media.
Another element raised in this article, written by REDA ZAIREG: “The hierarchy of courses of study will be reversed in favour of engineers from the 1980s onwards, due to the devaluation of legal studies in Morocco and of law degrees, given the strong expansion in the number of their holders, a trend aggravated by the dualism of higher education – selective engineering schools versus universities which record large outflows.
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