The school environment, what effects on "individual" aspirations? The case of entry into higher education.

Summary The purpose of this research is to analyze the differences in aspirations and orientation choices at the beginning of higher education. More specifically, the aim is to determine the extent to which "individual" choices, which have an impact on the construction of educational inequalities, depend on the schooling context. Indeed, since the diversified nature of schooling contexts in France no longer needs to be demonstrated, the first part of this work invites us, on the basis of work from the sociology of education and the Anglo-Saxon literature, to consider the contextual dimensions as being at the origin of school choices and aspirations. This question, which has not been explored in France for this level of orientation, was therefore the subject of the empirical work in the second part, which was based mainly on a combination of data from the DEP's Panel 95 and IPES data, as well as on an original survey conducted among students. Multivariate quantitative analyses show that the school environment is a significant factor in the aspirations of high school students (probability of considering one type of course rather than another and the length of study envisaged). The school environment plays a significant role in the study choices of young people with comparable school characteristics and a given social background. The contextual effect highlighted is twofold: the social composition of the school and the local offer of higher education (mainly the presence of a CPGE in the school) act together. In many cases, the cumulative effects of the school environment are at least equal in importance to those known from the individual's social origin, to which they are added. All in all, the preferences of individuals, situated in unequal contexts, are not insensitive to the organization of the educational system.