Community College in Paris? French say, “Oui”

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis once remembered her fellow-participants in the Smith College Junior Year Abroad in Paris as “slight expatriates . . . swaddled in sweaters and woolen stockings, doing homework in graph-paper cahiers.” Today, the eighteen thousand Americans who study abroad in France each year prefer flip-flops and iPhones, but, as in Onassis’s day, they are still mostly white, well off, and enrolled at a four-year college. The French government is hoping to change that, by providing “students traditionally underrepresented in study-abroad programs with an affordable opportunity to attend an educative program in France.”