An undergraduate programme focused on student success

The organisation of the Target University will fully integrate priorities that reflect public service missions: ensuring the reception, orientation, professionalisation and success of students. The aim is to adapt undergraduate programmes to students’ previous backgrounds, academic ambitions and personal projects, combining knowledge learning with the acquisition of technical and professional skills.

It also means providing and developing the necessary transition points between the institution’s training programmes and its internal structures, in order to respond to students’ personal projects built gradually after the baccalaureate.

Within the undergraduate programme structures, this progressive and dynamic orientation of students will be achieved by organising courses into major and minor disciplines and by introducing disciplinary and temporal modularity. These modular courses will be built in connection with the existing study programmes.

The Target University creates two new experimental structures: the Institute of Technology (EST - École supérieure de technologie) and the University Undergraduate School (EU1C - École universitaire de 1er cycle).

The EST is an internal structure of the Science, Technology and Society PFR (see Volume 3). It will run three-year (Bac+3) excellence professionalisation programmes with a very high integration rate. It will mainly be built on the study programmes provided by the IUTs with the aim of gradually expanding the training portfolio, in particular by offering professional diplomas over three years. The primary objective is the professional integration of students with a Bachelor’s degree (Bac + 3), with the possibility of obtaining a diploma after one or two years of study (Bac + 1 or Bac + 2).

The EST will thus run two main types of training: technological training (transversal, oriented towards a group of related careers) and vocational training (specialised, oriented towards a specific career) on a restructured and expanded portfolio, in connection with the labour market. These courses will welcome students on the basis of their professional projects, motivations and specific skills. Work-study programmes will be a key pedagogical mode.

The EST will have its own governance and resources and may have its own accreditation.

The EU1C will have a mission to welcome and guide, taking into account any remediation needs, and to train recent baccalaureate holders in a specific offer that is coordinated with the PFR Bachelor’s programmes, potentially enabling students to cross over to another programme during the three years of the EU1C course. Baccalaureate holders enrolled in the EU1C in their first year can either join, at different stages, the PFR’s Bachelor’s programmes or continue their degree programmes within the EU1C, depending on the training and degree levels available in each PFR.

The EU1C courses will offer modular, transversal and multidisciplinary degrees and training paths, but they will also propose specialised programmes allowing students to pursue their studies in connection with local and national study programmes. All Bachelor’s degree courses will be run by faculty members, who will remain assigned to the PFRs. This means that the pedagogical teams retain the full initiative for the content, organisation and evaluation of the Bachelor’s courses.