“A CEGEP graduation rate of 65% doesn’t make sense. We cannot be satisfied with that” and it would undoubtedly be necessary to review the French programs in particular, notes Bernard Tremblay, president and CEO of the Fédération des cégeps.

At the helm of this organization for nine and a half years, Mr. Tremblay, who is retiring, was at La Presse at the beginning of the month for a final interview*.

The numbers are there, relentless. The college graduation rate of 65% adds to the fact, underlines Mr. Tremblay, that 30% of young Quebecers do not even access CEGEP, “and that is a tragedy”.

“Because at 28, when they decide to go back to school, it’s the cross and the banner. »

As a retirement gift, we offered Mr. Tremblay a series of killer questions, just to ensure that he would not get bored of the media portion of his job once he left.

Could it therefore be possible that the success rate is so low because upon entry, young people simply do not have the level, particularly in French? These are the echoes of certain teachers, confirmed by a report produced in 2023 on behalf of the Ministry of Higher Education and which concludes that one in four students fails their first French course at CEGEP.

Mr. Tremblay is convinced that young people who are accepted into CEGEP have the right to do so and that almost all of them, with adequate support, can succeed. “For me, it’s an elitist speech” to claim the opposite, when we now know how to resolve blockages in the vast majority of cases.

The government “has invested a lot in school service centres to support students in difficulty, with convincing results”, in primary and secondary schools, but does not allocate enough money for success in CEGEP, and this, “even though we have a very voluminous action plan” detailing the steps to follow, continues Mr. Tremblay.

The amounts allocated to primary and secondary education and the many additional courses in French at CEGEP, until now, nevertheless result in anemic graduation rates at CEGEP, we submit.

For French, Mr. Tremblay acquiesces. A reflection needs to be carried out and it must be noted that the language is far from being mastered after secondary 5.

However, at CEGEP, at the age when young people are more able to understand grammatical rules, compulsory courses only focus on literature.

Note in passing that the Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, announced his intention to dust off the French programs at primary and secondary levels in 2025.

But Mr. Tremblay does not budge: for him, it is impossible to “abandon young people” who are having difficulties, even less so when almost all future jobs “will require a technical or university diploma”, for the battery sector , For example.

Quebec needs its young people, all its young people, he pleads fervently.

And its CEGEPs, which, according to Mr. Tremblay, represent “a proven model”, a remarkable social advance, not to mention that they are central “to the occupation of the territory in the regions”, as has already been quantified in particular the economist Pierre Fortin. (In 2004, he already estimated that CEGEPs injected more than 1.5 billion in direct spending into the local economic circuit.)

One of the main projects of former minister Marie Montpetit, who will succeed Mr. Tremblay at the helm of the Fédération des cégeps du Québec?

Currently, notes Mr. Tremblay, either “we wait for people to become unemployed” to offer them training, or “we finance companies so that they can train their staff”.

“That works in companies like Bombardier with a large human resources department, not when you are an SME. And people trained in companies are essentially the highest earners,” which leaves “a phenomenal number of workers” particularly at risk of finding themselves unemployed and without up-to-date skills when the economy declines.

We must both “recover the 26-year-old who works in a convenience store” and keep employees up to date, “which does not involve small training courses on the corner of a table”.

Finally, Mr. Tremblay has one wish: that the trend towards hypercentralization in Quebec be reversed. He remembers a Ministry of Higher Education with which “a dialogue was possible” and which knew the realities of CEGEPs and universities well. Today, he laments, everything is decided at the Treasury Board, to which the ministries must submit, even if they have more detailed knowledge of the networks.