The Google College Rankings

If we apply the Google-ranking approach to universities in France, what will we discover? A clean browser is essential, as always, so that our own account settings and preferences won’t influence the result. And we can search google.fr either on the French word université or the English word university.

The French-language search gives us these results (after a little advanced bio-neural filtering is applied):

1. Université de Nantes
2. Université de Poitiers
3. Université d’Orléans
4. Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
5. Université de Paris 12
6. Université de Caen Basse-Normandie
7. Université d’Angers
8. Université du Maine
9. [Université de Limoges]
10. Université de Bourgogne

And embedded within the raw results from which the above list was drawn, it should be noted, were two francophone universities in Canada: the Université de Montréal and Université Laval.

The tentative [Université de Limoges] might rank higher sans brackets.

And here are the English-language rankings from google.fr:

1. The American University of Paris
2. University Louis Pasteur – Strasbourg
3. Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC)
4. Montpellier 1 University (UM1)
5. Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines University (UVSQ)
6. Université Paris-Sud 11
7. Lyon University 2
8. Université Joseph Fourier
9. Nice Sophia Antipolis University
10. Paris Sorbonne University - Paris IV

The lack of overlap between these two listings suggests that the Francophone and Anglophone (or Anglo-friendly) education sectors in France are quite distinct. I don’t believe any of the other countries examined so far have had this much divergence between their local-language university rankings and their English-language rankings.