PARIS, Nov 11: French universities, who managed years ago to attract students who later became leading personalities of the political world — for example, Leopold Sedar Senghor, former president of Senegal, and Mrs Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, president of Sri Lanka — say they will be making a greater effort to persuade leading foreign students to undertake their studies in Paris.

In recent years, faced with the competition of institutions of higher learning in the United States, Great Britain, more recently Germany, and earlier on the Soviet Union, France had little by little lost its attractiveness to foreign students as a place of study, indeed even appeared to go out of its way to be most unwelcome and indifferent to the needs of students from abroad.

The French universities now say that all of that has changed and that they’re going out of their way to let it be known that French universities want and need more foreign students.

As for changing the French image of being a most unwelcome place for foreign students, all of that is to change too, which is why a group of universities has decided to take the bull by the horns and roll out the red carpet for the 30,000 students who annually come to study in France and notably in Paris.

The idea for the programme is the brainchild of Christiane Prigeant, a professor of art history at the Sorbonne.