Like Father, Like Child: Intergenerational Mobility in the French Grandes Écoles throughout the 20 th Century

Stéphane Benveniste

No 2318, AMSE Working Papers from Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France

Abstract: While the educational expansion of the 20 th century promoted social mobility overall, the top of the social hierarchy may have remained privileged. This paper examines the evolution of intergenerational mobility in admissions to the French elite colleges-the Grandes Écoles (GE)-over more than a century. Admission to these institutions is subject to partially anonymous competitive examinations, and their degrees are the ticket to top positions in the public and private sectors. In the growing literature measuring intergenerational mobility through surnames, I design a novel method and apply it to a self-collected dataset on all 285,286 graduates from ten of the most prestigious Grandes Écoles between 1886 and 2015. Principally, I find that children of male GE graduates were highly over-represented in the top colleges throughout the 20 th century. Importantly, unlike previous studies exploiting fathers' socio-professional categories, I find a stable low level of intergenerational mobility for all cohorts born since 1916: chances of GE admission for children of GE graduates were approximately 80 times higher than for the rest of the population.

Keywords: intergenerational mobility; higher education; elites; Grandes Ecoles; historical economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 J62 N34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 67 pages
Date: 2023-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-ger and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Working Paper: Like Father, Like Child: Intergenerational Mobility in the French Grandes Écoles throughout the 20 th Century (2023)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aim:wpaimx:2318

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