Engineering access to higher education through higher education fairs

Text from van Zanten A., Legavre A. “Engineering access to higher education through higher education fairs”, in Goastellec G., Picard F. (ed.) The Roles of Higher Education and Research in the Fabric of Societies, Leuven, Sense Publishers, 2014 (in press). Transition to higher education is a major social process. This transition has been mostly studied by French sociologists of education and higher education from perspectives focusing predominantly on the role of the socio-economic status, academic profiles and different tracks followed by secondary school students (Merle 1996, Duru-Bellat and Kieffer 2008, Convert 2010), and, to a lesser extent, on the types of secondary schools attended (Duru-Bellat and Mingat 1998, Nakhili 2005) and the local higher education provision (Berthet et al. 2010, Orange 2013). Although these structural determinants play a major role in explaining significant regularities, they provide more powerful explanations for individuals representing the extremes of the different variables considered, leaving room for the influence of other major factors for those students in intermediate situations. In addition, even in the case of students occupying extreme positions, structural perspectives better explain the distribution of students between different higher education tracks than they do between institutions and disciplines. In this chapter, we adopt a perspective that we see as complementary to and interacting with the perspective centred on structural determinants by focusing on the role of the devices that mediate the exchanges between students and higher education institutions, and more specifically on one device: higher education fairs. Our purpose in doing so is not only to document how these various devices frame, in ways that remain largely unexplored by researchers, exchanges between providers and consumers of higher education but also to point out – and further explore in future publications – how these devices, and the specific features of fairs, contribute to the reproduction and transformation of educational inequalities in access to higher education (Benninghoff et al. 2012)

The paradoxical role of meritocratic selection in the perpetuation of social inequalities at school

The school system is intended to offer all students the same opportunities, but most international surveys reveal an overall lower achievement for students from disadvantaged groups compared with more advantaged students. Recent experimental research in social psychology has demonstrated that schools as institutions contribute with their implicit cultural norms and structure to the production of inequalities. This chapter examines the role that a structural feature of school, namely meritocratic selection, plays in this reproduction of inequalities at school. First, we describe how meritocracy in the educational system can hold paradoxical effects by masking the virtuous/vicious cycles of opportunities created by educational institutions. Second, we present recent research suggesting that selection practices relying on a meritocratic principle—more than other practices—can lead to biased academic decisions hindering disadvantaged students. We propose that inequalities in school might not just result from isolated failures in an otherwise functional meritocratic system, but rather that merit-based selection itself contributes to the perpetuation of inequalities at school