France Imports Defeat: Fake Diversity Trumps True Merit
UCLA's undergraduate enrollment is now 60 percent female and 38 percent male following its 2020 elimination of standardized tests, a policy American universities are now reversing.
The University of California at Los Angeles has published enrollment figures revealing a dramatic gender imbalance that exposes the consequences of abandoning merit-based admissions, with undergraduate enrollment now standing at 60 percent female, 38 percent male, and one percent identifying as non-binary.
According to Valeurs Actuelles, this distortion is not an accident but the logical outcome of an ideological decision made five years ago that France is now replicating just as America begins reversing course.
In 2020, UCLA eliminated standardized entrance examinations under the banner of equity, citing alleged underrepresentation of women and Black and Hispanic students. An identical examination for all applicants, anonymous and indifferent to name or neighborhood, was declared guilty of perpetuating inequality. UCLA became test-blind, refusing to consider standardized test results even when submitted voluntarily.
Harvard Research Destroys the Equity Narrative
Reality has proven dramatically different from the theory. Research from Opportunity Insights, Harvard’s research center, reached a devastating conclusion: test scores predict university success better than high school grades. At Dartmouth, secondary school grades explain only nine percent of variance in university results. Standardized tests alone explain 22 percent, making them the best predictor for all groups, including those from modest backgrounds.
Worse still, eliminating examinations did not help disadvantaged students but punished them. Many brilliant students from disadvantaged backgrounds engaged in self-censorship and failed to submit scores that would have gained them admission.
The reversal has begun. MIT, Dartmouth, Yale, Harvard, Brown, Penn, Cornell, and Caltech have all restored mandatory entrance examinations. Harvard’s dean stated plainly that such predictive information is precious for identifying talent across the entire social spectrum. Serious American institutions have made their decision: examinations are not the enemy of the poor but their best advocate.
France Adopts Failed American Model
France, faithful to form, is picking up the discarded idea just as others abandon it.
The first example is Sciences Po. In 2019, under the direction of Frédéric Mion, the institute announced elimination of its written entrance examination. Admission would now be based on a dossier evaluated on four criteria including motivation and profile. The stated goal was greater equity and diversity of profiles. In practice, the anonymous examination that served as a bulwark against favoritism was replaced by dossier evaluation, which is to say, favoritism itself.
The second example is more serious still. In May 2025, Education Minister Élisabeth Borne presented her plan titled Girls and Mathematics. The program establishes numerical targets for feminization of scientific preparatory classes: 20 percent female students in 2026, 30 percent in 2030, reaching 40 percent by 2035. These figures represent relative rather than absolute values, meaning removing boys to make room for girls. Borne stated in the Senate on June 5, 2025, that the level would rise if the proportion of girls increased.
Quota Logic Defies Mathematical Reality
The assertion that imposing gender quotas would raise the level of a competitive selection process defies basic logic. The motivation for this strategy is fundamentally paternalistic and sexist in nature.
Numerous educational programs already enroll more women than men: the National School of Magistracy at 76 percent female, Medicine at 67 percent, Veterinary studies at 70 percent, Pharmacy and Dentistry at 65 percent, Biology at 60 percent, and paramedical programs at 84 percent female. Women represent 56 percent of university students overall and 59 percent of Masters students. The state demands no quotas or gender targets for these programs.
Setting aside this hypocrisy, the fundamental issue remains: either these girls have better grades than admitted boys, in which case an anonymous examination blind to name and sex would already rank them higher and admit them without any quota being necessary. Or a quota is required to admit them, which means they fall below the threshold and boys scoring higher are excluded, mechanically lowering the standard. A quota that raises standards is a logical impossibility, a square circle.
Borne has invented selection from below that supposedly elevates from above.
The Numbers Tell a Different Story
The figure the minister never cites reveals stability over time. The proportion of women among engineering graduates rose from 22 percent in 2000 to 30 percent in 2023: thirty years for eight percentage points of growth, followed by a plateau. In scientific preparatory classes, girls represent 38 percent of candidates and 32 percent of those admitted.
Feminization has nothing to do with academic level and everything to do with disciplinary preference. At Polytechnique, the pinnacle of scientific selection, women constituted 17 percent of incoming students in 2024. In BCPST, the biology-veterinary track that is far less mathematical, women represent 70 percent. The divergence occurs upstream at the secondary level: 38 percent of female graduates choose a scientific track compared to 72 percent of male graduates.
The pattern reflects different group preferences and aptitudes emerging organically through free choice rather than discrimination requiring state intervention to correct.
With information from Valeurs Actuelles
