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

Stéphane Benveniste

Working Papers from HAL

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: I23; N34 Intergenerational mobility; Intergenerational mobility; Higher education; Elites; Grandes Écoles; Historical economics; JEL Classification: J62 I23 N34 Intergenerational mobility Higher education Elites Grandes Écoles Historical economics; JEL Classification: J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-09
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://amu.hal.science/hal-04221167
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://amu.hal.science/hal-04221167/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Like Father, Like Child: Intergenerational Mobility in the French Grandes Écoles throughout the 20 th Century (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-04221167

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().