Widening Participation in France and Its Effects on the Field of Elite Higher Education and on Educational Policy

Abstract

This chapter analyzes policies of widening participation (WP) in elite higher education institutions and, more specifically, the programs launched in France in the early 2000s. Although these policies concern a small number of beneficiaries and are still far from significantly improving the access of disadvantaged students to the most selective sector of higher education, they represent an interesting object of study for sociologists of education for at least two reasons. The first is that these policies have to some extent modified the internal power relations between institutions in the field of elite higher education. The second is that the institutions involved have proposed analyses of, and solutions to, educational inequalities that have influenced the way in which the latter are framed and tackled at the local and national level.