Higher Education And Social Mobility In France

This book offers an in-depth sociological exploration of the social trajectories and experiences of children of post-colonial immigrants in France who are embarking on paths of extreme upward intergenerational mobility. The author draws on life history interviews with young adults of North African immigrant background, enrolled at or having recently graduated from the country’s elite higher education institutions, the grandes écoles, to delve into largely under-researched pathways and give a voice to high-achieving members of a population that continues to be collectively associated with difficulties to ‘integrate’. The volume constitutes the first sociological study to document, from the individual actor’s perspective, the everyday experience of racism within France’s elite educational institutions and to reveal the upward mobility experience to be informed by the interlocking effects of racial processes, immigrant ancestry, class background, and gender. Challenging the pervasive representation of descendants of North African immigrants as ‘unsuccessful’ and ‘unable to integrate’, this book sheds light on the experiences of the largely silent upwardly mobile members of a stigmatized minority group, revealing the strategies used to respond to the constraints to their mobility and the importance of familial histories of post-colonial migration, characterized by the former generation’s efforts, sacrifices, and resilience, in informing these ‘success stories’.

Based on a unique historical source, this book examines the social origins, career expectations, and first jobs of 28,000 students in the “elitist” French secondary schools of the 1860s. Using sophisticated statistical analysis as well as conventional historical sources, the work concludes that schooling reached a wider audience than has been so far believed and that substantial social mobility occurred within the school system, but that family background, rather than educational factors, directed students’ career aspirations and achievements. It also argues that although education expanded in urban, industrialized areas, mobility did not increase in these areas. A final chapter reconsiders nineteenth–century thought concerning education in the light of findings about the social effects of schools.

The experience of shifting from one social class to another—from a dominated group to a dominant group—raises the question of how the upwardly mobile person relates to his/her group of origin. Stepping into the Elite traces the particular ways in which upwardly mobile people in India, France, and the United States—countries embodying three distinct stratification systems—make sense of this change. Given that people draw upon specific cultural tools or repertoires to analyse their world and situate themselves in it, Naudet identifies the extent to which narratives of ‘success’ vary from one country to another. For instance, he explains that while stories in a caste-ridden society such as India hinge on the preservation of bonds with the original class, in France, they are centered on the idea that an upwardly mobile person is alienated from all social groups. In the United States, on the other hand, the rhetoric of success is tinged by the ardent belief in the American society being classless. A sociological journey in three different cultural contexts, this book deftly ties the exploration of questions regarding transformation of social identity and views on being successful.

"In Moving: A Memoir of Education and Social Mobility author Andy Hargreaves tells the story of his working-class roots, his education, and his experiences with social mobility. Beginning with his youth in the small working-class town of Accrington in Northern England and ending with his experiences at University, the author relates his journey through the education system and all that education has done for him. The author describes what it means to be working-class, his personal successes and failures, and the ways that education allowed him to lift himself out of poverty. However, he also describes the ways that many others were left behind and never given the chance to be socially mobile. The author believes that there are lessons that can be learned from his experience of social mobility and that these lessons can be applied to society at large. In particular, educators can use these lessons to encourage and support students' social mobility and increase the number of students who can become socially mobile. These lessons can also be used to create schools that are kinder to working-class students and to students who are socially mobile. Readers will connect to the engaging, heart-felt story of the author's life and, through it, learn about the reality of social mobility, how it is experienced, and how it can be supported"--

In times of growing economic inequality, improving equity in education becomes more urgent. While some countries and economies that participate in the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) have managed to build education systems where socio-economic status makes less of a difference to students' learning and well-being, every country can do more. Equity in Education: Breaking Down Barriers to Social Mobility shows that high performance and more positive attitudes towards schooling among disadvantaged 15-year-old students are strong predictors of success in higher education and work later on. The report examines how equity in education has evolved over several cycles of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). It identifies the policies and practices that can help disadvantaged students succeed academically and feel more engaged at school. Using longitudinal data from five countries (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Switzerland, and the United States), the report also describes the links between a student's performance near the end of compulsory education and upward social mobility - i.e. attaining a higher level of education or working in a higher-status job than one's parents.

Building upon extensive research into modern British society, this book traces out trends in social mobility and their relation to educational inequalities, with surprising results. Contrary to what is widely supposed, Bukodi and Goldthorpe's findings show there has been no overall decline in social mobility – though downward mobility is tending to rise and upward mobility to fall - and Britain is not a distinctively low mobility society. However, the inequalities of mobility chances among individuals, in relation to their social origins, have not been reduced and remain in some respects extreme. Exposing the widespread misconceptions that prevail in political and policy circles, this book shows that educational policy alone cannot break the link between inequality of condition and inequality of opportunity. It will appeal to students, researchers, policy makers, and anyone interested in the issues surrounding social inequality, social mobility and education.

Social Mobility in Europe is the most comprehensive study to date of trends in intergenerational social mobility. It uses data from 11 European countries covering the last 30 years of the twentieth century to analyze differences between countries and changes through time. The findings call into question several long-standing views about social mobility. We find a growing similarity between countries in their class structures and rates of absolute mobility: in other words, the countries of Europe are now more alike in their flows between class origins and destinations than they were thirty years ago. However, differences between countries in social fluidity (that is, the relative chances, between people of different class origins, of being found in given class destinations) show no reduction and so there is no evidence supporting theories of modernization which predict such convergence. Our results also contradict the long-standing Featherman Jones Hauser hypothesis of a basic similarity in social fluidity in all industrial societies 'with a market economy and a nuclear family system'. There are considerable differences between countries like Israel and Sweden, where societal openness is very marked, and Italy, France, and Germany, where social fluidity rates are low. Similarly, there is a substantial difference between, for example, the Netherlands in the 1970s (which was quite closed) and in the 1990s, when it ranks among the most open societies. Mobility tables reflect many underlying processes and this makes it difficult to explain mobility and fluidity or to provide policy prescriptions. Nevertheless, those countries in which fluidity increased over the last decades of the twentieth century had not only succeeded in reducing class inequalities in educational attainment but had also restricted the degree to which, among people with the same level of education, class background affected their chances of gaining access to better class destinations.