One very nice thing about the engineering GEs, is that apart from Mines/Centrale which we have to consider seperately, the ENSIs are all so specialised that good students and not-as-good students can be seperated by specialisation rather than only by prestige.

ie. the best students get the most "trendy" specialisations (aeronautics...), while the worst students get the least "trendy" ones (paper), and like I pointed out with the example of my friend above, paper is just another specialisation, it doesn't make you any less of an engineer than an electronics one. Thus even if the "paper" school is less prestigious, it won't be a problem because you'll only be competing against paper specialists anyways.

This doesn't exist in HEC ... mainly because the school I went to is one of very few public schools (I think there are only two). All the others are private which means that students are discriminated upon by business prestige alone (ie by a school's budget and its lobbying relations, more than by any specialisation).

Sorry I'm tired, I don't know if I'm making any sense here.