The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Policy makers are increasingly searching for ways to allow more disadvantaged students to access and complete higher education. The quickly growing (quasi-)experimental literature on policy interventions in higher education provide the opportunity to identify the causal effects of these interventions on disadvantaged students and discuss inequality mechanisms at the last stage of the educational system. The paper reviews 75 studies and rigorously compares more than 200 causal effects of outreach and financial aid interventions on the access and completion rates of disadvantaged students in higher education. The paper finds that outreach policies are broadly effective in increasing access for disadvantaged students when these policies include active counseling or simplify the university application process, but not when they only provide general information on higher education. For financial aid, the paper finds that need-based grants do not systematically increase enrollment rates but only lead to improvements when they provide enough money to cover unmet need and/or include an early commitment during high school. Still, need-based grants quite consistently appear to improve the completion rates of disadvantaged students. In contrast, the evidence indicates that merit-based grants only rarely improve the outcomes of disadvantaged students. Finally, interventions combining outreach and financial aid have brought promising results, although more research on these mixed interventions is needed.

The large proportion of dropout students from higher education has become a major concern in many industrialized countries. Despite consistent evidence of the association between social origin and dropout behaviour, it is unclear through which mechanisms social origin influences trajectories and educational outcomes in higher education, especially in countries with low financial costs for higher education studies. This study builds on the compensatory advantage mechanism to investigate the relationship between social origin, academic failure in higher education and dropout behaviour. Using a French longitudinal survey and event history analysis, results confirm that academic failure in the first year of higher education is a strong predictor of dropout, even after controlling for academic readiness for higher education. Supporting the compensatory advantage hypothesis, students from advantaged backgrounds are much less likely to drop out after academic failure than disadvantaged students and this result also holds for high-performing high-school graduates. These results stress the importance of taking into account the interplay between social origin and academic performance during higher education to reduce dropout behaviour.

This paper examines the labour-market returns to different high school tracks in the French context. We use rich nationally representative longitudinal data running from the beginning of secondary education until entrance into the labour market: the Panel d’élèves du second degré, recrutement 1995 combined with the Entrée dans la vie adulte-EVA follow-up survey. Analysing these data, we are able to identify the consequences of track placement in high school on various labour-market outcomes controlling for social and academic selection into tracking. Our results show that academic diplomas offer higher labour-market benefits than vocational diplomas, even when adjusting for selection into tracks based on prior school performance, family background and other socio-demographic characteristics. The advantage of the academic track stays large, both for the whole group of upper secondary graduates and for those who have not achieved a tertiary degree. Our results further indicate that academic qualifications are even more rewarding for service-class graduates. We discuss the theoretical and policy implications of our results for processes of intergenerational reproduction.<br /><br />Key messages<br /><ul><li>Secondary academic diplomas offer higher labour market benefits than vocational ones, even when adjusting for selection into tracks.</li><br /><li>The academic path is the most rewarding option in France, even among students who do not complete tertiary education.</li><br /><li>Secondary academic qualifications are even more rewarding for service class graduates, in terms of boosting access to service class jobs.</li></ul>

Résumé Avec l’allongement de la scolarité, les inégalités sociales d’accès à l’enseignement supérieur sont devenues une préoccupation majeure de la recherche sur la stratification sociale. Cet article vise à décrire empiriquement le développement des inégalités tout au long de l’enseignement secondaire pour expliquer les inégalités d’accès à l’enseignement supérieur français. En se fondant sur le panel d’élèves du second degré 1995, il estime que les inégalités d’accès au supérieur résultent à 81 % d’inégalités dans l’obtention du baccalauréat. Confirmant l’aspect cumulatif de la scolarité, l’accumulation de résultats scolaires négatifs pendant le secondaire contribue largement à la sous-représentation des élèves défavorisés parmi les bacheliers. Les données montrent aussi que les trajectoires des élèves avec des difficultés scolaires initiales similaires divergent largement selon le niveau d’instruction des parents, confirmant l’hypothèse de l’avantage compensatoire. À l’inverse, un effet de renforcement, menant à des trajectoires divergentes entre bons élèves, suivant l’origine sociale, est aussi mis en évidence pour l’accès aux filières prestigieuses du supérieur et vient compléter l’hypothèse de l’avantage compensatoire. Ces résultats soulignent la nécessité de considérer les interactions entre performance scolaire et milieu social pour appréhender le développement des inégalités tout au long de la scolarité.