The Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de Paris, founded in 1881, is along with ESSEC and ESCP one of the three Grandes Ecoles – France’s highly selective and prestigious sector of technical institutions – devoted to business education which are known as the Trois Parisiennes.
HEC Paris is a Grande école, a French institution of higher education that is separate from, but parallel and connected to, the main framework of the French public university system.
HEC Paris has numerous double-degree agreements with French and foreign institutions, including Sorbonne Université, Sciences Po, the École Normale Supérieure, the École Polytechnique, the Technical University of Munich, Yale University and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology abroad.
The 2017 Times Higher Education Alma Mater Index found that it was the leading business school in Europe, and second in the world only to Harvard, as a producer of chief executives of Fortune 500 companies. HEC’s own figures show at least 4,000 alumni who are CEOs, CFOs or proprietors of their own companies.