Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-05-10
Source: The Conversation – France (in French)– By Alban Mizzi, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Bordeaux
How is Parcoursup and enrollment in higher education perceived when one has already experienced a forced school orientation? A survey among high school students supported by a program of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine Region offers some insights. Initial elements of analysis.
The countdown has begun. Starting from May 20, vocational high school seniors will take the written exams of the baccalaureate. But alongside the marathon of revisions, they are awaiting another verdict, that of the Parcoursup results, and thus the outcome of their applications to higher education.
How do these high school students experience the post-secondary orientation process? How do they perceive theParcoursup platformA?
The programACCESS – Supporting the transition to higher education– which follows professional high school senior students in Nouvelle-Aquitaine during the procedure, provides us with some insights. It shows that the orientation process begins for these students well before, with the opening of the platform, where the relationship of these students to the school institution is shaped.
Before Parcoursup: orientations often endured
Almost all the students met share one thing in common: their arrival in the vocational track was not the result of a fully assumed choice. An academic level deemed insufficient for the general second year, a limited local offer, a rushed guidance counseling may have led to this direction. The
If the subject has been extensively documented, thisguidance through failuretowards vocational pathways takes on a particular significance compared to what awaits these students on Parcoursup. It is with this background that they approach the platform: a vague feeling of having been sorted out even before the competition begins.
Alone in front of the machine
Parcoursup requires skills that are not systematically taught to students: navigating a dense interface, distinguishing between wishes and sub-wishes, writing motivation letters for programs they do not know, interpreting acceptance rates whose meaning remains opaque.
The heterogeneity of support between institutions is striking. In some high schools, workshop teachers show how to fill out a wish, advise adding a BUT as a complement to BTS, and check the next day that the student has not validated the wrong choice. Others call in external interventions. Finally, others rely on the students’ resilience capacity to already overloaded schedules.
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Mohamed, in his final year of mechanical studies, describes the registration itself as a technical process. “At first, it was complicated. We had a lot of information to connect. We didn’t understand the codes.”
Faced with these difficulties, students do indeed mobilize what they have, but the line between autonomy and loneliness is thin.
Continuous stress
It is Mohamed who finds the most accurate way to describe thestress generated by Parcoursup. “Every time I feel like having fun or doing something that’s not school-related, this stress comes back. Even if it’s not very strong, sometimes it’s always there. Whatever I do, it will be there. It runs in the background, all the time.” The computer metaphor is telling: a process running in the background and consuming cognitive energy without ever closing.
What fuels this anxiety goes far beyond the question of placement in a program. Parcoursup remains a moment where, within a compressed timeline, something that concerns self-worth is at stake. The emotional burden is entirely privatized, borne alone.
Mennel speaks several times of a “knot in the stomach.” For most of our respondents in vocational high school, the stress remains confined to an intimate space invisible to their relatives. The parents do not understand the system. The teachers themselves are sometimes “overwhelmed.” There remains the peer group, which goes through the same major ordeal.
A structural solitude
The PsyEN are absent from their accounts. The CPE as well. The “Parcoursup moment” as they experience it is a moment of structural loneliness. Structural because it does not depend on the personal qualities of the individuals, but on the architecture of a system that produces anxiety without providing the conditions for its management.
And this loneliness adds to everything else: the forced orientation, the lack of information, the feeling of illegitimacy, and, for some, difficult living conditions that make the ordeal all the heavier. Adrienne sums it up in a phrase that condenses everything with almost sociological precision: “We’re not very, very, very lucky… one could say that we’re not very much loved.”
As long as the system does not take this experience seriously, it will remain an unconsidered issue for a quarter of French high school graduates.
Alban Mizzi received funding from the PIA3 ACCES – Supporting access to higher education.
–ref. Vocational high school students, the great forgotten of Parcoursup?https://theconversation.com/vocational-high-school-students-the-great-forgotten-of-parcoursup-281072