Social Differentiation and Higher Education: The French Case

Abstract

It has been stated that when American higher education became universal, the question of who enters college gave way to the question, Who goes where to college?' We will show that in the French context the question of which institution to attend has long been of the utmost importance, although higher education in France has only recently become a mass phenomenon. Internal differentiation within higher education does not mean that the college-noncollege dichotomy has become obsolete: the whole system of education in France, it will be argued, became horizontally differentiated as it expanded vertically. Institutional differentiation fosters credentialism by generating an inflationary demand for degrees partially channeled into dead-end educational tracks. In the few institutions guaranteeing their graduates a life membership to industrial and governmental elites, enrollments have remained virtually unchanged since the forties. Yet they have been soaring in institutions with weaker links with the labor market.