Which high schools offer the best chances of success for major schools? Discover the 2025 ranking of the best preparatory classes for the Grandes Ecoles (CPGE) from L’Etudiant. This very comprehensive tool covers all sectors (commerce, engineering, literature, etc.). It will allow you to find the preparations best suited to your objectives.
Whether they lead to the integration of major schools of business, engineering or specialties in the field of humanities, CPGEs prepare their students for competitive examinations which they take after two years of post-baccalaureate studies.
Which organic preparation best prepares you for AgroParisTech? What literary preparation to enter ENS? Which ECG preparation integrates the most of its students into HEC, Essec or ESCP? You will find all this information in our 2025 ranking of preparatory classes. Like every year, we have divided this list between literary, scientific and economic.
In our 2025 ranking, only public and private prep schools under contract with an enrollment of more than 15 students at the start of the 2023 school year are classified. The others are either displayed as unclassified in our tables, or do not appear there.
A precise photograph of the results of all the preparations for the 2024 competitions
The 2025 ranking of the best preparatory schools of the Etudiant is based on the analysis of data concerning 2024 integration : the more students a prep school integrates into the best major schools, the higher it appears in the tables. In addition to the 2024 integration performance, you will find in the preparation sheet the rank and the integration average over five years (2020-2024), to compare with the national average over five years. In the denominator, we observe the total numbers of those registered for the 2023-2024 school year, and not just those who took the competitive exams.
This classification is designed as an orientation aid tool. Obviously, your success in the competitions will not depend on the rank of the prep in this list. A regional prep school in the middle of the table will perhaps support you better than a large Parisian high school. But this file offers you a precise snapshot of the results of all the preparations for the 2024 competitions.
Prep rankings: instructions for use
Each ranking includes several “baskets” of schools considered the most attractive: Polytechnique, CentraleSupélec, Mines Paris… for those of you who want to pursue a career in engineering. For business and management schools, the baskets include HEC Paris, Essec, ESCP BS, Edhec and Emlyon. For fans of literary subjects, Normale Sup’, IEPs or even Celsa, the Louvre school… make up the basket.
Thus, you can – for each sector – customize the ranking based on a selection of schools you are targeting. For example, for scientific CPGEs, you can find out in one click which are the best prep classes for entering Polytechnique and/or ENS. Likewise, if you want to join a CPGE in the economic field, you can quickly find out which preparations best accompany HEC, or other business schools in broader baskets.
The principle is simple: for a class, we look, in relation to its number, at the number of students who have joined the schools in a basket. This gives a percentage of students who have successfully integrated. The preps are then classified according to this rate in each basket.
Which business school after literary preparation?
Last year the student added new detailed Parcoursup data for each prep: the average success rate over five years in the associated basket, the share of scholarship recipients in the outgoing class as well as the baccalaureate average of these students.
This year, we made the decision to create a basket dedicated to integration into business school after literary preparation. Indeed, more and more students are taking advantage of the recruitment difficulties of “Business Schools” to try their luck at Sigem. Find this information in basket 4 of the three literary classifications (A/L, B/L and LSH).
Click on the sector that interests you and let yourself be guided.
Click on the sector that interests you and let yourself be guided.
Click on the sector that interests you and let yourself be guided.
Our methodology
To establish our list of 2025 preparatory classeswe have sifted through the results of the 2024 competitions for scientific, commercial or literary preparatory courses. We were interested in students who actually joined the Grandes Écoles. This choice allows us to avoid counting students admitted to different competitions several times.
To measure the overall integration rateprep by prep, we reported the number of integrated students (different school baskets) to the number of students in each prep. The numbers were provided to us by the Ministry of National Education for the almost 900 public prep courses under contract with the French State present in our list. The others are not included in this ranking.
The data concerning the number of entrants and their original high school comes from the competitive examination offices of the Grandes Ecoles or competitive examination banks. For literary preparatory courses, some grandes écoles do not produce statistical tables with the origins of their students. We therefore directly questioned the high schools and cross-referenced the names of those integrated with the lists of names provided by the major schools.
We have removed from this ranking the high schools which mainly prepare for major military schools.
Other articles in our file dedicated to the classification of prep courses:
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