Social origins and educational attainment in France: A true meritocracy?

摘要

In the developed countries, inequality in access to primary education has become essentially non-existent. This is also becoming the case in secondary education, mainly at the lower secondary level, but such inequalities do still exist in upper secondary and higher education, despite the fact that they tend to be decreasing almost everywhere. Thus, contemporary studies in the industrial world are less concerned with issues of access, and increasingly concerned with inequalities in attainment and in educational opportunity, so as to determine the extent of the democratization of access to education. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the changes in inequality in educational opportunity in industrial societies since World War II, specifically in France. I will also analyze the changes in inequality of educational opportunity vis-a-vis immigrants in post-industrial societies and in France.