ABSTRACT
The meritocratic ideal is firmly entrenched in, and celebrated by France’s Republican model; yet, as Chapter 3 reveals, individual self-determination and academic excellence have not sufficed for the respondents to embark on elite educational pathways. Most of them had in fact never heard of preparatory classes to grandes ecoles and grandes ecoles themselves before their two final years of secondary school. Rather, entry into these elite higher education institutions has been possible through a set of specific institutional mechanisms access to which was in most cases the outcome of largely unpredictable circumstances and fortuitous encounters, in addition to the close involvement of older siblings and/or mothers in their schooling experiences. Furthermore, admission into these has largely been lived by the respondents as a ‘deviation’ from the educational routes destined to them, children of working-class racialized immigrant backgrounds embarked on. Their narratives point to the class- and race-based barriers inscribed in France’s educational system they have had to overcome in order to ‘make it’.
