A prestigious image: advantage or obstacle in attracting candidates to French elite higher education?

Abstract

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.