"You can be the president's nephew and it won't help you get in," says Bernard Oppetit, a 1978 graduate of X who later worked for BNP Paribas before starting Centaurus Capital, a London investment fund with US$4 billion under management.
The Ecole Polytechnique was founded in 1794, during the French Revolution, to train the country's military engineers, and it officially remains under the umbrella of the French ministry of defense. Not only is the school free, but students also receive a stipend from the government to cover their expenses.
"We call it l'elitisme democratique," says Pierre Tapie, dean of Essec, a leading French business school. "These are places where you meet extraordinary people who are there because they worked hard and are among the most brilliant of a generation."
Although the school teaches high-end fare like physics, engineering, and computer sciences, its broader goal is to create a leadership cadre that shares an ordered, prioritized view of the world, says Xavier Michel, the president of the Ecole Polytechnique and an active-duty general in the French armed forces.
In France, this is known as the Cartesian system, after the mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes, and Michel says the school encourages its students "to modelize" the world. And when they eventually become chief executives, he says, "they understand what are the capabilities of their companies. They understand what they can do and what they can't do."
Until, of course, models run off the rails - as they so often do in the business and financial worlds, regardless of what country devises them.
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