Quotes: Students Without Pre-college Degree

“In order to enrol, you have to undergo an interview
which is more of an individualised reception than a skills test, and
prove 24 months of salaried work and 36 months in 1976. (...) Once the
rule of three years of salaried employment was reluctantly accepted, the
university refused to change its rules. It only added, under pressure
from feminist struggles, the fact that raising a young child up to the
age of three was considered the equivalent, for mothers, of salaried
work.” (Berger, Courtois, and Perrigault 2015, 194-5).

“Every student is an adult and every adult is
considered a student among others. We will therefore simply try to
create the conditions to welcome employees, by working on Saturdays and
continuing the lessons every day until 10pm and even 11pm. Very quickly
all the students will be mixed together. (...). This strong desire for
diversity and the confrontation of students of different ages,
experience and academic level was one of the keys to the pedagogy. We
will speak of a university open to employees, we will welcome
non-baccalaureate holders, but we will never speak of 'young people of
low level' as we did from the time of the Barre plan [April 1977]. We
will soon welcome, without any preconceived intention, a considerable
number of foreign students, a large proportion of whom were themselves
non-baccalaureate holders (more than 30% in some years), but without
making prior knowledge of French a condition for access to Teaching
Units, i.e. by pursuing the same logic of refusing to accept any
prerequisites.” (ibid., 191).