École Normale Supérieure
graduate schoolPrivate
| École Normale Supérieure link () Website | |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Paris, France |
| Type | Private |
The École normale supérieure; also known as ENS Paris) is one of the most selective and prestigious graduate schools in Paris, France. It is one of the French grandes écoles (higher education establishment outside the framework of the public university system).
It was initially conceived during the French Revolution and was intended to provide the Republic with a new body of professors, trained in the critical spirit and secular values of the Enlightenment. It has since developed into an institution which has become a platform for a select few of France's students to pursue careers in government and academia.
The school is very small in student numbers. Its core of students, who are called normaliens, are selected via a competitive exam called a concours (baccalaureate + 2 years) after a preparatory class. Two hundred normaliens are thus recruited every year, half of them in the sciences and the same number in the humanities, and receive a monthly stipend (around €1,350/month in 2018), and in exchange they sign a ten-year contract to work for the state.
The principal goal of ENS is the training of professors, researchers and public administrators. Among its alumni there are 14 Nobel Prize laureates including 8 in Physics (ENS has the highest proportion of Nobel laureates among its alumni of any institution worldwide, 12 Fields Medalists (the most of any university in the world), more than half the recipients of the CNRS's Gold Medal (France's highest scientific prize), several hundred members of the Institut de France, and scores of politicians and statesmen.
The ENS increasingly came to be seen by some as an antechamber to the École nationale d'administration, as more young students drawn to politics and public policy began to be attracted to it, such as future President of the Republic Georges Pompidou, Prime Ministers Alain Juppé and Laurent Fabius, and ministers such as Bruno Le Maire and Michel Sapin, respectively the current and former Ministers of Finance of France.