The invisible students: tracking the boom of for-profit higher education enrolment in France
Résumé
For-profit higher education institutions have expanded rapidly in France, yet no reliable administrative data exist to measure their enrolment. Existing public figures suggest that between 8 and 15 percent of students attend for-profit institutions. This broad range reflects a deeper problem: many invisible students who are missing from official statistics. This article addresses three questions: (1) how and why has enrolment in for-profit higher education expanded so quickly, particularly after the 2018 apprenticeship reform; (2) why do existing estimates of the sector's size vary so widely; and (3) what is a more grounded figure? We show how apprenticeship funding, permissive regulation and weak oversight have supported the boom while obscuring its scale. Using self-reported data from providers, we obtain an estimate of around 450,000 students, close to the upper bound of existing approximations.