Hugues Draelants

Flaunting one's academic pedigree? Self-presentation of students from elite French schools

This article starts from the puzzle that although French elite institutions enjoy extremely positive and attractive images, students from these schools generally choose to conceal their academic pedigree in their daily interactions. We show that, in a context of growing inequalities of access to grandes écoles, the strategy of hiding ones student identity may be understood as the desire to avoid six core threats associated with declaring ones association with an elite school: not conforming to group norms, confirming a negative reputation, not living up to a positive reputation, reducing ones identity, losing control of ones identity, and threatening the identity of the other. The conclusions highlight the implications of this microsociological study on a host of much wider questions useful in better understanding the ambivalent relations that exist between French society and its elites issued from the grandes écoles.

Des héritiers aux initiés? Note sur les nouvelles modalités de la reproduction sociale par l’école

In the French-language literature on education, the notion of the inheritor, popularized by Bourdieu and Passeron’s 1964 book, is still commonly used to evoke the ideal-typical student from the most socially advantaged backgrounds. But does it truly capture what is at stake today in the reproduction of social inequalities at school? Several societal and educational changes prompt us to take a new look at the theories and concepts used to explain and interpret the modes in which social inequalities reproduce themselves. To condense and evoke what characterizes today’s privileged student, we have extended the metaphor of the ‘insider’, asking ourselves what are the adjustments this new language would suggest for the theory of social reproduction. The issue of access to elite institutions in France is an empirical illustration of the heuristic potential of such an approach.

A Prestigious Image : Advantage or Obstacle in Attracting Candidates to French Elite Higher Education?

One hundred and twenty students successful at entering four of the most famous French grandes écoles (École Normale Supérieure Ulm, Polytechnique, HEC, Sciences Po) were questioned about their institution’s image. We focus on how the prestige of these institutions in the French society played a role in students’ attraction and contributed to build their aspirations to integrate them. Initially, the knowledge and the awareness of the symbolic meanings associated with these institutions are very unequal among these students. As this paper shows, they depend on their family and school former socialisation. If the prestigious image exerts an undeniable attraction on numerous students, its effect on their feeling of accessibility is ambivalent. It intimidates the majority of them, particularly those with fewer social and cultural capital, thus complicating their identification with the institution. These findings suggest that the public image of these elite institutions can be of interest in understanding the socially differentiated attractiveness of this selective segment of higher education in France.