Research note for CNESCO on individual and contextual factors of higher education achievement in France ; Note de recherche pour le CNESCO sur les facteurs individuels et contextuels de la réussite dans l'enseignement supérieur en France
Since more than 40 years of age, French research on student background has focused on the university system. Initial work focuses on social inequalities of success and in particular on the role played by students' cultural and linguistic capital (Bourdieu -Passeron, 1964). Thus, for these authors, the University mainly performs a function of selecting individuals and conveying the legitimate and dominant culture held by 'heirs' (students of easy social origin). In their view, the University makes it possible to reproduce the hierarchy of classes and social structures, masking the social origin of unequal educational performance and naturalising them through a donation ideology. This approach has been strongly contested by some sociologists (Boudon, 1973) and economists (Levy-Garboua, 1976) who consider that social inequalities in success are essentially the result of differentiated behaviour by students. They perceive the costs, risks and benefits of studies differently depending on whether they are of an easy or disadvantaged social origin. Students of popular origin are more sensitive to the risk of failure than the children of senior managers (Duru -Mingat, 1988). Students now focus more on their "ways of studying" (LAHIRE, 1997; Fernex and Lima, 2016), their study report, adaptation and integration into the University. In particular, Alain Coulon (1997) considers that students' success depends on adapting to the functioning of the university, learning university methods and finally acquiring a relative master's degree in university rules. However, all this work implicitly considered that the findings of students were valid regardless of their place of study. Only in recent years has the local and territorial dimension been introduced in research (Felouzis, 2001). In the last ten or so years, new problems have emerged, in particular the problem of 'dropping out' and dropping out of studies (Beaupère and Boudesseul, 2009), in an economic context where leaving higher education without a diploma increasingly ...