This Wednesday, access is given to Parcoursup’s 2025 training map. The opportunity for final year students to start thinking about their direction during the Christmas holidays. Jérôme Teillard, Parcoursup project manager at the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, answers questions from 20 Minutes on the use of this platform known to be a source of stress for the families of high school students who are considering higher education.
What information is available from this Wednesday? And are there any new features for 2025?
From this Wednesday, we are updating the map of training courses offered for the start of the 2025 school year and available to the entire public so that high school students and their parents have all the elements to prepare their orientation project.
Among the new features this year, an interactive tool which allows high school students to see the profile of admitted candidates by entering their type of baccalaureate and their two specialty courses in final year (for a general baccalaureate), as well as their general average. He has access to very concrete results: the proportion of high school students with a profile comparable to his own who have received offers of admission over the last three years and the academic profile of high school students who have chosen to join the training.
The platform already offered employment integration rates for BTS training. From January 15, we will also find the future of students (in employment, studies, etc.) for 75% of the training offered.
We will also have information on salaries, twelve months after the students leave their training. Our goal is to provide clear, rich and useful information.
How to use the platform properly?
We must understand the information on the platform as an opportunity to open up our perspectives, to exchange with higher education teachers and students. When you are a high school student, you often think that there is only one training course to lead to a career. The reality is that there are many different training courses offered on Parcoursup which lead to the same professional environment, but sometimes we only knew about one.
Since 2023, you can create an account on Parcoursup even if you are not a baccalaureate candidate. Last year, 193,000 users took advantage of this possibility. One of the right answers to the question of stress associated with the transition to higher education is to anticipate. We know from the CSA Parcoursup barometer that more than seven out of ten students report that they have discovered training on Parcoursup and that they are interested in their post-baccalaureate orientation well before the final year. And it’s better to avoid concentrating the challenge of discovering these courses on the final year alone.
We want to prevent candidates from being overconfident and self-censoring. We know, for example, based on research, that girls, in the absence of quantitative information, are much more likely to refrain from making wishes for selective training, compared to boys. What we want is to fight against these biases. We must encourage the autonomy of high school students and encourage them to diversity with ambitious wishes of reason and others of security.
Is Parcoursup a well-established system, seven years after its launch?
The device is broken. But obviously, we continue to improve the tool as best we can, based on feedback from previous generations. By construction, access to higher education is a delicate step. We are going to leave our high school, our environment and sometimes our parents and as a large range of choice possibilities opens up, this produces anxiety.
I want to remind you that Parcoursup is only a first choice, and that you can reorient yourself and change your training. Last year, 169,000 students registered on Parcoursup to reorient themselves [la réorientation est possible via des passerelles à l’université ou à travers Parcoursup].
Last year, 134 supported high school students had not found training at the end of September out of 645,000 high school students registered on the platform. We of course continued to accompany them afterwards.
Final year students will have to complete their wishes online, between January 15, 2025 and March 13, 2025.
