In farm fields south of Paris, billions of euros are being ploughed into a new modern university campus designed to rival Harvard, MIT and Cambridge as one of the world's best.
The Paris-Saclay super-campus is France's answer to years of decline in higher education, with the result that the nation's best university only ranks 40th in the world.
France, a country that builds state-of-the-art nuclear reactors, super-fast trains and boasts cutting-edge aerospace, now wants to show off its brain power in scientific research and learning.
"Our goal is to rank among the top 10 universities in the world," said Herve Le Riche, who heads the €4.4 billion project in Saclay, a plateau of grain fields dotted with clusters of modern buildings.
Already home to some top-notch colleges such as the Polytechnique engineering school, the new campus will start opening its doors in 2015 as a grouping of 23 universities, colleges and research institutes.
New laboratories, amphitheatres, student housing along with shops and transport will be built with a view to making France a destination for some of the best and brightest who now head to US and British universities.
Many French elite colleges produce crackerjack scientists, engineers and managers, but they are often too small to sustain cutting-edge research programmes that wealthy American universities are known for.
Paris-Saclay aims to combine academic training with research from high-performance institutes like the CEA nuclear agency, while tapping into the innovation from big industry names like Thales, a European leader in aerospace.
The ambitious project enjoys the backing of one key figure: President Nicolas Sarkozy whose government is digging deep into its pockets to make the dream of a world-class university a reality.
Mr Sarkozy got the academic world talking when he announced that one billion euros of his 35-billion-euro national loan programme would go to Paris-Saclay.
That's on top of 850 million euros earmarked for the project under his government's university reform programme.
During a recent visit to New York's Columbia University, Mr Sarkozy heaped praise on "this magnificient place" and remarked that he wanted to "reform French universities based on the model that you have here".
France fares poorly in the world universities ranking compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Paris VI Pierre and Marie Curie University is the top rated French university, coming in at number 40 in the 2009 ranking.
Only two universities in Europe are among the top 10: Britain's Cambridge and Oxford. Harvard tops the list and eight of the top 10 are in the US.