A project backed by Sciences Po and seven other French higher education institutions that aims to create a new Paris university has been selected as a winner of the French government’s “excellence initiative.”

The planned new university, to be named Université Sorbonne Paris Cité, would be a major research and teaching institution with 120,000 students and 6,000 researchers spread over three campuses in and around Paris.  The ambition is for it to become one of the top 10 universities in Europe and one of the top 30 in the world in the next decade.

The project groups four universities - Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris Descartes, Paris Diderot and Paris 13 - and four higher research establishments. They are Sciences Po,  the Institut national des langues et des civilisations orientales (INALCO), the Institut de physique du globe de Paris (IPGP) and the École des hautes études en santé publique (EHESP).  By joining forces, they are seeking to overcome structural divisions in the French higher education sector between traditional universities and more elitist grandes écoles.

The Université Sorbonne Paris Cité project was submitted to the government in the second round of its « excellence initiatives ». It was selected, along with four other projects, by an international jury composed of university administrators, academics and private sector figures.

Université Sorbonne Paris Cité has been conceived as a multi-disciplinary university with four main divisions, each of which corresponds to a major area of research and teaching. These are engineering, medical sciences, arts, literature and languages, and social sciences. Alongside these divisions will be interdisciplinary institutes with ambitious research programmes.

The new university will offer a range of degree programmes, from undergraduate to PhDs. One of its ambitions is to reduce the high failure rate among first and second year students in French universities by putting in place a foundation year that will provide first year students with skills and tutoring to help them succeed.

Two of the three campuses will be in the heart of Paris, at Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter and on the Left Bank of the Seine. A third will be just outside the city, to the north.

“We are very proud to have been selected,” said Richard Descoings, the president of Sciences Po who coordinated the consortium project. “Our vision is to bring about a true transformation of the French higher education and research system. We are very aware of the size of the task that we need to accomplish, but we count on the strong involvement of our communities to achieve that.”