Drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished data, this article analyses social inequalities in access to the grandes écoles and how these have evolved since the mid-2000s. Despite the ‘opening-up’ measures introduced by certain grandes écoles to diversify their student body, these elite institutions have remained almost entirely closed to pupils from disadvantaged social backgrounds, and their recruitment base has hardly changed over the last fifteen years. This persistence of inequalities in access to the grandes écoles can only be partly explained by differences in academic performance between pupils from very privileged backgrounds and those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Its root cause lies further upstream in the lack of diversification in recruitment to preparatory classes and post-A-level schools over this period. This failure calls for a re-examination of the measures that could be implemented to broaden recruitment to selective courses.
HAL: halshs-03674360
