Promoting “social diversity”, urban segregation and Inequalities: The case of Sciences Po in Paris

Promoting “social diversity”, urban segregation and inequalities: the case of Sciences Po in Paris

 The strong historical process of social reproduction in many selective universities in France (“grandes écoles”) is becoming a crucial issue and more and more reconsidered. In the last decade, many of these universities have implemented specific programs in order to “diversify” socially the student population.

The classic way of analysing the impact of these programs is measuring how the profile of students is changing, but with no attention to the area and the high school from which they are coming. However, because of urban segregation and political construction of priority-depressed areas, and also because of the high concentration of the most selective high schools in Paris Downtown and in few wealthy suburbs, the territorial approach reveals different patterns.

Studying the specific case of Sciences Po within the large Paris Metropolitan area, I will try to answer to several questions: Are Sciences Po working class students equally distributed in the urban space? Are they coming from a limited number of high schools, those concerned by Sciences Po agreement? What about the chances of pupils with lower middle class background to have access to a selective university? Are these programs changing urban, school and social hierarchy? To what extent residence, school and social background are intertwined and are affecting school opportunities in a big city like Paris?

This paper is a contribution to the debate on urban and school segregation, analysing how affirmative action programs deal with both urban and social inequalities. Some comparatives elements with Chicago selective high schools system will be used to stress the opacity of the selection and the affirmative action in the French Educational system, and how each system deals with urban and ethnic segregation.