Public Debate

Dépenses d’enseignement supérieur : quelles disparités selon le genre des étudiants ?, IPP Policy Brief, n°83, octobre 2022.  

Thanks to new data on the cost of higher education in France, combined with a survey on young adults, this note documents the disparities in higher education spending by gender in France. Due to a strong under-representation of women in the most well-resourced fields of study (classes préparatoires aux grandes écoles, university institutes of technology, grandes écoles, etc.) as well as in scientific disciplines - which are more costly due to higher student-teacher ratios - higher education spending on female students is 18 percent lower than that allocated to their male counterparts. These disparities are not explained by different lengths of study but by different orientation choices in terms of tracks and fields of study.

Quelle démocratisation des grandes écoles depuis le milieu des années 2000 ? (with Pauline Charousset, Julien Grenet and Georgia Thebault), IPP Report n°30, 300 p., janvier 2021.  

This report documents, as precisely as possible, the evolution of recruitment to the classes préparatoires and the grandes écoles since the mid-2000s. The study favors a quantitative approach based on a very rich set of administrative data that have not been systematically exploited until now. These data are used to characterize the evolution of the profile of students in these programs according to several dimensions: their social origin, their gender, their geographic origin and their previous schooling.

Grandes écoles: quelle « ouverture » depuis le milieu des années 2000 ? (with Pauline Charousset, Julien Grenet and Georgia Thebault), IPP Policy Brief, n°61, janvier 2021.

Thanks to rich administrative data, this note documents the evolution of the recruitment of the grandes écoles since the mid-2000s, according to several dimensions: social composition, geographical origin of students and gender distribution. Despite the "opening up" measures that have been put in place by some grandes écoles in an attempt to diversify their student profiles, their recruitment base has remained very narrow and has hardly changed over the past 15 years. While their enrollment has increased significantly over the period, these elite institutions have remained almost entirely closed to students from disadvantaged social backgrounds, the share of students from outside the Paris region has not increased and female students remain underrepresented. This persistent inequality of access to the grandes écoles is only partly explained by the differences in academic performance between the groups considered. It has its source upstream in the lack of diversification in the recruitment of preparatory classes and post-bac schools. The inability of the social opening measures implemented since the mid-2000s to initiate a democratization of the grandes écoles highlights the limits of the approach that has been favored until now: a proliferation of local initiatives, without any real national coordination and rarely evaluated. This failure invites us to rethink the levers that could be mobilized to diversify the recruitment of selective programs and encourage greater circulation of elites.

How have inequalities in educational spending in the United States evolved over the past five decades?, WID.world Issue Brief 2020/01, March 2020.

Are educational spending in the US more or less equally distributed than in the past? This briefs aims to describe the concentration of investments in education both for K-12 and for higher education in the US from 1970 to 2017. Even if the distribution of education spending is less unequal than the one of income or even wages, these spending are still very unequally distributed and, like for income and wages, inequalities have significantly increased over the past four decades, due to spending in higher education. Indeed, the top 10% of students for whom the most is spent used to have 28% of the total amount of instructional expenditure in higher education in 1970 and now have more than 36%. Inequalities in educational investments are coming from two sources: unequal length of studies and unequal spending per grade, the latter being the main driver of the concentration observed. As a matter of fact, if everyone were to have the same educational attainment, the level of inequalities would almost be the same. The only way to reduce significantly the concentration of spending on education would be to equalize spending within each grade across districts and universities.