Noble Lineage and Inequalities in Access to Elite Education

Stéphane Benveniste ()
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Stéphane Benveniste: CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, AMSE - Aix-Marseille Sciences Economiques - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - ECM - École Centrale de Marseille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) from HAL

Abstract: This paper examines the overrepresentation of students with aristocratic ancestry in elite higher education. It relies on a sample of 269,917 students from ten leading French grandes écoles between 1911 and 2015 and uses surname-based indicators of nobility. Individuals with aristocratic ancestry are between six and nine times more likely to enrol in one of these ten grandes écoles than the rest of the population, compared to eleven to fifteen times a century ago. While historically concentrated at Sciences Po Paris, their presence has become more evenly distributed across top-tier institutions, with business schools now showing the highest levels of overrepresentation. The analysis also shows that noble men are more overrepresented than noble women in these top-tier institutions, although this gap has narrowed. These results underscore that beyond the abolition of legal privileges, historical hierarchies persist. Future research could distinguish the extent to which this persistence may reflect the transmission of social, educational, cultural, or economic capital.

Keywords: elite higher education; grandes écoles; nobility and aristocracy; history of inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-04-06
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Published in Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics, 2026, 548, pp.51-67. ⟨10.24187/ecostat.2025.548.2141⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:cesptp:hal-05793797

DOI: 10.24187/ecostat.2025.548.2141

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