Contenu du sommaire : Les classes populaires dans l'enseignement supérieur

The analysis of the distribution of students among the different curricula and disciplines of higher education during the first five years of university makes it possible to specify the functions of these curricula within the educational strategies followed by students, at a time when approximately half of an age group is granted access to higher education. The idea that the university would be undermined by the competition between curricula based upon initial selection must be nuanced. The competition it faces from vocational training is strong, but it is most effective when weaker freshmen are concerned. The disciplines are thus distributed within a field where “vocational” curricula, whether traditional (medical school, law) or more recent, are opposed to disciplines geared toward teaching. Another opposition exists between disciplines requiring a specific prior training (arts and sciences) and those requiring none (such as artistic disciplines), while others (in particular the social sciences) are frequently the default curriculum for students coming from modest social backgrounds. Each disciplinary subfield is characterized by persistent social, educational and gender hierarchies.

Selections and professionalization are today presented as possible answers to the high failure and drop-out rates of undergraduates, in particular in vocational schools training specialized technicians. These vocational programs take in the bulk of the “new students” reaching higher education, i.e. students with modest social background, and students with a technological or vocational baccalauréat. By analyzing jointly the prior construction of these educational aspirations and the recruitment at the entrance of these programs, the paper shows how the educational system shapes these “elective” educational choices. Enrollment in these programs then appears as the product of the regulation of the educational ambitions of freshmen coming from modest social backgrounds on the one hand, and of their socially and educationally situated recruitment on the other.

This paper focuses on the policies implemented by universities in order to counteract the failure rates denounced by public authorities. It compares these policies with the rational constraints faced by students, and in particular with the constraints resulting from a prior educational trajectory. It challenges the idea that “universities generate failure”: universities are unable to integrate students who enroll in college because they have no other alternative, and fail to assist them in internalizing dispositions toward “hard work.” Such dispositions are not equally necessary for success, but they are sorely lacking when students have only little educational capital at their disposal when they enroll in college. In the end, the paper suggests that student responsibility is the product of a specifically political choice, which is not the most conducive to the democratization of higher education.

Despite a “massification” of the student population, access to higher education is still determined by social inequalities: depending on their class background, young people face variable chances not only of becoming students, but also of reaching the more advanced diplomas and the curricula leading toward the highest social positions. Such inequalities are strengthened by the reliance, throughout the university years, on student jobs that vary enormously in terms of their nature and their impact on student performance. Illustrated by statistical data, this social differentiation of student jobs becomes particularly salient when ethnographic surveys contribute to fleshing out the ways in which students make use of these jobs. The paper outlines several distinct logics, which correspond to different types of linkage between the university and the job market and to different ways of envisaging the future. This suggest how these forms of “professional experience” contribute to reproducing social inequalities.

This paper focuses on the different strata formed by the “children of educational democratization” and emphasizes the social and educational hierarchies that structure the pursuit of higher education diplomas by students with a modest social background. The ethnographic survey of graduates from the lower middle classes reveals that what is at stake in their entrance in public service professions is the conversion of respectable studies into reasonable social mobility. By recalling the weight of social and educational determinants in the status achievements or status decline of this specific fraction of lower middle class youth, this survey sheds light on the mediations that inform upward mobility and on the social conditions that shape the subjective assessment of the social distance that separates these graduates from their parents.

The debates that have been taking place in France for the past ten years around the social enlargement of the recruitment pool of the grandes écoles and the classes préparatoires have focused on ethical or statistical issues, thus obscuring the experiences of the beneficiaries of these policies implemented in elite curricula. Based on a study of the emergence of these mechanisms ensuring an enlarged social recruitment, and more specifically of the students and teachers of an experimental classe préparatoire (specifically designed for students coming from difficult schooling districts), the paper questions the ambivalent ways in which the students, because of their statistically implausible success, relate to their own social background (neighborhood, peers, family) and to their new social context (the new school, its “atmosphere,” its students and its teachers). It first focuses on the emergence of these recent policies promoting a social diversification of recruitment and on the circumstances under which the experimental classe préparatoire was created. After emphasizing the tensions and the contradictions that the students face before and after the year they spend in this program, the paper looks at the practices and the symbolic compromises that allow them to find their position within the social universes to which they belong.

On the basis of an ethnographic survey of students admitted through a scholarship in two of the most prestigious French business schools, HEC and ESSEC, this paper reconsiders the questions of the educational trajectory and professional career of these beneficiaries of an “educational miracle.” If the students from modest social backgrounds are still an extremely small minority within the best business schools, their educational trajectories are rather surprising and therefore deserve to be analyzed. They reveal the relative difficulty with which these students, who are over-mobilized at school, convert their educational dispositions in managerial dispositions as they get into business school, in an entirely new institutional and normative framework. The analysis of their professional outlets also suggests that the disparities between social classes are not yet reduced: even as their performance locates these deserving students high in the rankings, they are far from choosing the jobs that are at the most rewarding in terms of social prestige and income.