Ia France is, just after the United States, one of the countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) where intergenerational social mobility is the lowest: the rank of children in the income distribution of their cohort is very strongly correlated to the rank of their parents.
This is one of the lessons of a study which compares this correlation in the eleven countries where it has been reliably measured, based on the income that individuals declare to the tax authorities. The study shows that social mobility in France is, for example, much lower than in Switzerland, Spain, Australia or Canada.
Comparable to the United States
How can France, despite having a much more generous education and social protection system than in the United States, have social mobility almost as low as in this country? Part of the explanation is to be found in inequalities of access to higher education.
Another one study shows that, while only 35% of young people whose parents belong to the lowest decile of the income distribution have access to higher education, this rate rises to almost 90% among young people whose parents are in the lowest decile The highest.
Here again, the level of inequality in access to higher education is comparable to that observed in the United States, which is surprising when we know that a year of university in France is almost free, but costs 39 000 dollars (about 35,556 euros) on average in a private American university, and 11,000 dollars in a public university.
Despite the limited cost of studies, the very low success rate for the bachelor’s degree, in particular among technological or professional baccalaureate holders, probably leads some young people from working-class backgrounds to give up higher education: the risk is too great of leaving without a diploma.
Duplication of classes
Even with identical academic results at the baccalaureate, young people from disadvantaged backgrounds access less to selective streams of higher education (preparatory classes, post-baccalaureate schools, Grandes Ecoles). The unequal geographical distribution of these training courses on the territory partly explains this phenomenon: with equal academic performance and social origin, the pupils are more likely to apply for a preparatory class or a BTS when these courses exist in or near their high school.
It is to be hoped that this unquestionable observation of the extent of inequality of opportunity in France will provoke an electric shock. Several rigorously evaluated interventions have attempted to reduce these inequalities. For example, the duplication of CP and CE1 classes in REP+ (priority education network) reduced by 38% the performance gap in mathematics between REP+ students and the rest of the students, and the performance gap in French by 16%, but it is not yet known whether these effects last long enough to reduce inequalities in access to Higher Education.
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