ABSTRACT
France pioneered the institutionalised higher education, followed by certain German states, particularly Baden and Prussia. Significant advances were made in the French technical education as early as the seventeenth century, but most of them took place during the eighteenth century, and they were of great importance to the present structure of education in France. According to the organisation plan of 1876, the upper division at Chalmers should take a middle-rank position between the technical university of Stockholm and the technical secondary school, founded around 1850. The problem of analysing the development of highly qualified engineers in France involves the total view of the annual number of graduates and thereby the problem of calculating the total number of these engineers in the society at different times. For obvious reasons, the total number of students in Sweden qualifying at the corresponding Swedish technical schools in Stockholm and Gothenburg was smaller than in France and Germany.
