It was the launch year for the My Master platform. Designed to unify the registration calendars for the different training courses, at its launch, it was also intended to facilitate the registration of license graduates for their bac + 5: a single platform, a single phase of submission of wishes, a single phase of training responses and the promise to better satisfy candidates waiting for a proposal.
For 2023 alone, nearly 210,000 candidates have confirmed at least one application on the platform which, unlike Parcoursup, does not have an algorithm for pre-selection of files. Three quarters of candidates received an offer, 82% for general licenses, 57% for professional license graduates. At the finish line, only 63% of candidates accepted a proposal.
An inflation of applications…
In detail, certain masters have a very high number of applications compared to their available places. This is the case for the master’s degree in developmental psychology with 31 candidates for a place, that of Defense Security, also 31 candidates. Or psychology and neuropsychology (28), chemistry of aromas, perfumes and cosmetics (23), human rights and international justice (21), international relations (21), culture, heritage and mediation (20) or artificial intelligence ( 20). Among them, apart from international relations, all are small promotions, rather with promising titles. Which attracts a lot of candidates.
“As with Parcoursup, when you move from a method of applications made from open days near you and the advice of your main teacher to a large national and centralized platform, that multiplies the number of applications”, analyzes Julien Gossa, lecturer at the University of Strasbourg and member of the Conference of Higher Education and Research Practitioners (CPESR): “We have training courses which until now received 50 to 100 applications for 15 places, who receive 600 candidates at once. By multiplying the applications, which are all standardized, we have the impression of increasing our chances. »
Problem is, bachelor’s degree holders don’t always get the master’s degree they hope for. Students may come across their future teachers in the hallways of colleges, or attend some of their conferences or seminars. As for their undergraduate professors, they often know the master’s teacher-researchers, except that they are sometimes the same. The admission decision? “It remains discretionary. These young people are already in the system, we identify them from the license. The teachers will try to detect their future doctoral students. Generally we have already had them in class, they have come to ask questions, etc. »
Very numerous places in certain masters
Some masters have a large number of places, but two stand out from the rest, the MEEF first degree and second degree masters. These two main MEEF master’s degrees together have 31,000 places, or 18% of the places available in master’s degrees. More than 40,000 candidates submitted an application and 21,000 accepted a place in the main and subsequent admission phase, or 16% of candidates.
Although these courses have a lot of places, they are not overwhelmed with applications: MEEF, LLCE, Letters or Philosophy seem to contain enough places to accommodate all the candidates, who nevertheless do not fill the lecture halls at the start of the school year. They indicate a number of available places which is not reached, in the main phase as well as in the second phase. In total, of all the training courses available on My Master, 146 of them are less than 80% full. A quarter of them have less than 10% of candidates who, at the very end, accepted a proposal.
Figures to be taken with a pinch of salt for Julien Gossa. “We can clearly see that the filling rate in the complementary phase is not counted when the number of candidates is less than 5, and many are indicated as unavailable. It also doesn’t count those who quit in the first week, those who were already repeating a year or those who register otherwise. On the other hand, it measures the performance rate of the platform. »
A competition between the masters?
The best formations are taken by storm and the others left aside? Not for Julien Gossa: “We have created a competition between the masters, but it is artificial, because it is not said that there will be a transformation in recruitment. We can have recruitment identical to that which was before. And filling the empty places seems to be an illusion, because people not good enough to be taken to Strasbourg are not going to pay for a move to Rennes to do a master’s degree, they do not necessarily have the money available, nor the ‘envy. Especially since the selection first eliminates the less economically advantaged. »
And that the question of mobility counts for a lot in the choice of your bac + 5. “Moving has a cost. If you took advantage of the license to make three friends for your roommate, that’s another thing than going roommate with people you don’t know. It’s not just a question of training provision, it’s broader than that. If all universities had affordable housing, if not free for all, we would have much greater student mobility. And that would increase competition for good: if you live near the Sorbonne, nothing stops us from applying there! But we would be surprised at the number of young people who would do an M1 in Marseille for the sun or in Rennes because they love Brittany. »