Higher Education And Social Mobility In France

This book offers an in-depth sociological exploration of the social trajectories and experiences of children of post-colonial immigrants in France who are embarking on paths of extreme upward intergenerational mobility. The author draws on life history interviews with young adults of North African immigrant background, enrolled at or having recently graduated from the country’s elite higher education institutions, the grandes écoles, to delve into largely under-researched pathways and give a voice to high-achieving members of a population that continues to be collectively associated with difficulties to ‘integrate’. The volume constitutes the first sociological study to document, from the individual actor’s perspective, the everyday experience of racism within France’s elite educational institutions and to reveal the upward mobility experience to be informed by the interlocking effects of racial processes, immigrant ancestry, class background, and gender. Challenging the pervasive representation of descendants of North African immigrants as ‘unsuccessful’ and ‘unable to integrate’, this book sheds light on the experiences of the largely silent upwardly mobile members of a stigmatized minority group, revealing the strategies used to respond to the constraints to their mobility and the importance of familial histories of post-colonial migration, characterized by the former generation’s efforts, sacrifices, and resilience, in informing these ‘success stories’.

This book explores higher education, social class and social mobility from the point of view of those most intimately involved: the undergraduate students. It is based on a project which followed a cohort of young undergraduate students at Bristol's two universities in the UK through from their first year of study for the following three years, when most of them were about to enter the labour market or further study. The students were paired by university, by subject of study and by class background, so that the fortunes of middle-class and working-class students could be compared. Narrative data gathered over three years are located in the context of a hierarchical and stratified higher education system, in order to consider the potential of higher education as a vehicle of social mobility.

Based on a unique historical source, this book examines the social origins, career expectations, and first jobs of 28,000 students in the “elitist” French secondary schools of the 1860s. Using sophisticated statistical analysis as well as conventional historical sources, the work concludes that schooling reached a wider audience than has been so far believed and that substantial social mobility occurred within the school system, but that family background, rather than educational factors, directed students’ career aspirations and achievements. It also argues that although education expanded in urban, industrialized areas, mobility did not increase in these areas. A final chapter reconsiders nineteenth–century thought concerning education in the light of findings about the social effects of schools.

In times of growing economic inequality, improving equity in education becomes more urgent. While some countries and economies that participate in the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) have managed to build education systems where socio-economic status makes less of a difference to students' learning and well-being, every country can do more. Equity in Education: Breaking Down Barriers to Social Mobility shows that high performance and more positive attitudes towards schooling among disadvantaged 15-year-old students are strong predictors of success in higher education and work later on. The report examines how equity in education has evolved over several cycles of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). It identifies the policies and practices that can help disadvantaged students succeed academically and feel more engaged at school. Using longitudinal data from five countries (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Switzerland, and the United States), the report also describes the links between a student's performance near the end of compulsory education and upward social mobility - i.e. attaining a higher level of education or working in a higher-status job than one's parents.

The book mainly investigates the challenges that confront France’s unique dual system of higher education in facing internationalization and the recruitment of international students. This book focuses on the development of the institutional strategies in two groups of higher education institutions: University and Grande École in responding to the opportunities and stresses of both Europe’s Bologna process and globalization. The research data presents in this book was collected from four local institutions, two Grandes Écoles and two universities, one of each focusing on the social sciences and the other on natural sciences and technology. Interviews with major stakeholders in the institutions, including personnel from international offices, faculty/researchers and international students were adopted as principal methods for data collection. The thematic organization of the findings in each chapter covers views from three levels of stakeholders’ and interprets the results within theoretical frames, such as institutional theories, world-system theory, international academic relationship theory and branding theory. Readers will find this book both practical and innovative in four key ways. Firstly, in knowledge diffusion, revealing the mysterious veil of the unique French dual higher education system. Secondly, in new knowledge production, exploring a new subject of research and filling the blanks from previous studies of the two groups of institutions. Thirdly, in presenting new interesting sights into current reforms in Frances’s higher education and how far principles of path dependency will ensure strong continuities with the past as against a tendency to homogenization in response to pressures from Europeanization and global ranking systems. Finally, in exploring the dimension of interculturality and the interplay between researcher’s identity and research process.

This report provides new evidence on social mobility in the context of increased inequalities of income and opportunities in OECD and selected emerging economies. It covers the aspects of both, social mobility between parents and children and of personal income mobility over the life course, ...

Social Mobility in Europe is the most comprehensive study to date of trends in intergenerational social mobility. It uses data from 11 European countries covering the last 30 years of the twentieth century to analyze differences between countries and changes through time. The findings call into question several long-standing views about social mobility. We find a growing similarity between countries in their class structures and rates of absolute mobility: in other words, the countries of Europe are now more alike in their flows between class origins and destinations than they were thirty years ago. However, differences between countries in social fluidity (that is, the relative chances, between people of different class origins, of being found in given class destinations) show no reduction and so there is no evidence supporting theories of modernization which predict such convergence. Our results also contradict the long-standing Featherman Jones Hauser hypothesis of a basic similarity in social fluidity in all industrial societies 'with a market economy and a nuclear family system'. There are considerable differences between countries like Israel and Sweden, where societal openness is very marked, and Italy, France, and Germany, where social fluidity rates are low. Similarly, there is a substantial difference between, for example, the Netherlands in the 1970s (which was quite closed) and in the 1990s, when it ranks among the most open societies. Mobility tables reflect many underlying processes and this makes it difficult to explain mobility and fluidity or to provide policy prescriptions. Nevertheless, those countries in which fluidity increased over the last decades of the twentieth century had not only succeeded in reducing class inequalities in educational attainment but had also restricted the degree to which, among people with the same level of education, class background affected their chances of gaining access to better class destinations.