Study in Paris

Budget roughly €1200/month sharing an apartment (colocation), or around €1680/month for your own studio. Both figures include rent, food, transport, and daily expenses. Studio rents run in the mid-hundreds per month, with shared rooms notably cheaper; CAF housing aid of €100–300 is available for eligible students.

Paris is home to several leading institutions including Sorbonne (53,400 students) and Paris Cité. Top grandes écoles include HEC, Sciences Po Paris, École Polytechnique. The strongest fields are Law, Medicine, Arts, Engineering, Business. EU students pay €178/year and non-EU students pay €2895/year at public universities.

Paris has good public transport. A discounted student pass (Imagine R Étudiant) is available — check RATP / Île-de-France Mobilités for the current rate. The city is bike-friendly with Vélib' (1,400+ stations) bike-share. Airport access is available via CDG via RER B (30 min), Orly via RER B + tram.

Yes. Students in Paris on a French student visa can work 964 hrs/year (~18.5 hrs/wk). The local student job market is strong — finance, tech, fashion, luxury, consulting. Internship opportunities are also exceptional — all major sectors headquartered here.

Almost always. Paris has France's tightest rental market, so landlords expect a French guarantor and a complete dossier. If you don't have one, use Visale — the free, state-backed guarantor scheme for under-30s; the certificate is issued online in about a week and is widely accepted. Have the whole file ready as one PDF before you view, because flats here go within hours, not days.

Yes — the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris in the 14e is a park-set campus of around 40 residence houses built specifically for international students and researchers, with subsidised rooms, canteens and its own RER B station. It's a Paris institution with no real equivalent in other French cities, but demand vastly outstrips supply, so apply months ahead through your home institution or the CIUP and keep a private-market backup.

The Imagine R Étudiant pass from Île-de-France Mobilités is the one to get: an annual student season ticket covering the whole Île-de-France region — every métro, RER, tram and bus, including the RER B out to Charles-de-Gaulle airport — paid by monthly direct debit and cheaper per month than the standard Navigo Mensuel.

Harder than anywhere else in France. CROUS halls exist but Paris has far more applicants than rooms, so treat a CROUS place as a long shot rather than a plan. Most international students end up in private studios, colocations, or just outside the Périphérique in the inner suburbs where rent drops sharply. Budget two to three months of searching and expect to lose several flats before one sticks.

Yes, and it's a genuine Paris advantage: Eurostar runs from Gare du Nord to London St Pancras in about 2h20 and to Brussels in roughly 1h20, with onward high-speed links to Amsterdam and Cologne. No other French student city has direct high-speed trains straight to London. Book weeks ahead for the cheaper student-friendly fares.

More easily than in most of France. PSL, Sciences Po, HEC and the Sorbonne institutions run a wide range of English-taught Master's programmes and their international offices are used to non-French speakers. For daily life, English is common in central and student areas, though you'll still need some French for admin, CAF and the préfecture.