The health crisis that broke out in 2020 and the measures put in place to fight the epidemic have brought to the fore the difficulties that more and more young people are encountering in their studies and when they enter the labor market. But behind the expression "Covid Generation", isn't it diversity that takes precedence?

Under the direction of Tom Chevalier and Patricia Loncle, a group of researchers wonders about these inequalities and the way in which public action, or young people themselves, try to respond to them in a book entitled “A sacrificed youth? », published on August 25 by the Presses universitaires de France.

In the excerpt that we offer below, the sociologist Nicolas Charles examines “the price to pay for school massification” and the illusion of a necessary match between training and employment.

France is one of the European countries where the youth unemployment rate has remained at a worrying level for the past thirty years. In general, the conditions for the professional integration of the younger generations have gradually deteriorated. Among higher education graduates, access to permanent employment has become rare and salary levels (excluding inflation) have stagnated. At the other end of the scale, those with few or no qualifications experienced major integration difficulties, with more periods of inactivity and unemployment.

It is thus a form of educational downgrading that we are witnessing: with the same diploma, the baccalaureate for example, one reaches a position of manager or intermediate professions much less frequently and quickly. At the same time, with a long higher education cycle, access to a management position is no longer assured. The French situation is worse than that of other countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States: young French people have a much higher level of qualification than the older generations - this gap is less clear in Anglo-Saxon countries -, but they are unable to position themselves on the labor market in relation to their elders, due to the segmentation of the labor market by age group. The new generation, overeducated, is thus in fierce competition for favorable social positions in limited numbers.

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To meet this challenge, the public authorities strive to defend the necessary match between training and employment: each training course must prepare for a profession and each profession must correspond to a training course. This adequacyist aim is reflected in the implementation of public policies aimed at the "young" public: professionalization of initial training diplomas, development of youth contracts and apprenticeships... These policies are all based on the assumption that young people are insufficiently trained in connection with the labor market, mainly because they make supposedly irresponsible choices and education actors guide them in an unrational way. Thus, the solution to youth unemployment would be to massify “effectively”, ie to make studies a direct entry gate into the labor market. This postulate then avoids having to structurally rethink social and employment policies that would make it possible to give a greater place to youth in society and in the labor market.

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Is this postulate even scientifically valid? In other words, can training transform a young person into a qualified professional? We would almost forget that for more than thirty years now, this training/employment relationship has been diagnosed as "untraceable", that no training perfectly prepares for a profession, regardless of the level of qualification, and that France has this particular, compared to other European countries, that it persists in believing in a form of matching training/employment like a magical thought.

This adequationist aim thus only has marginal effects on the inclusion of the youngest in the labor market, because people already integrated into the labor market are, by definition, more in adequacy with real professional practices. The irresponsibility of public authorities is not only due to a lack of understanding of the direct consequences of the challenges of educational expansion. As we will see, it is also possible to promote massification without public spending following the same growth.

Massify without additional public expenditure

While public spending on education is growing steadily, excluding inflation, it has fallen in twenty years as a share of GDP (7.3% in 2000; 7.0% in 2010; 6.7% in 2018). Is this the sign of a demographic decline by which the number of school children would have decreased? In reality, the number of students has even tended to increase: around 12.7 million primary and secondary students, stable between 2000 and 2018, but more than 500,000 additional higher education students over the same period. Growing student flows, declining funding: the scissors effect is necessarily felt on the quality of the education system. Thus, with the high birth rate of the 2000s, a large number of new pupils arrived at nursery school without the massive recruitment of teachers. This is how the enrollment rate for 2-year-old children fell from 34% in 2000 to 11% in 2010 (and has not risen since).

The latest example of a massification of the education system to the detriment of quality concerns higher education. The large generations, in elementary school in the 2000s, reached high school at the same time as the success rate increased by a few points in the process, so that the number of candidates for higher education has steadily increased . With the number of students thus increasing from 2.32 million in 2010 to 2.68 million in 2018, expenditure per student fell at the same time, from 11,910 euros to 11,470 euros (-3.7 %), 2 so that the level of expenditure per student in France remains below the OECD average.

This reduction in expenditure is made possible by three mechanisms. First, the ministry has gradually and implicitly outsourced part of higher education to the private sector. If the latter occupied only 13.5% of students in 2001, this was the case for 18.6% of students in 2017 and even 20.6% of them in 2019. Private engineering schools welcomed 2.3 times more students in 2019 than in 2000, when all engineering courses saw their numbers increase by only 1.8 times. The number of business school students has multiplied by 3.1 in barely twenty years, rising to 199,000 students. Since private higher education is only marginally subsidized, its development constitutes an opportunity for massification without public expenditure.

Second, recent university massification has been accompanied by an increase in tuition fees in public higher education outside universities. Thus, public establishments that are highly autonomous (institutes of political studies) or not dependent on the Ministry of Higher Education (engineering schools) have increased their fees to a few thousand euros, sometimes with a policy of modulation of these costs according to social origin. The role of the public authorities has been decisive here: in return for a stagnation, or even a reduction in public spending, they have opted for a policy of "laisser faire" when large schools, including public ones, have recently asked to increase their tuition fees.

Thirdly, the introduction of Admission post-bac (APB) and then of Parcoursup was an opportunity to gradually extend the scope of selection at the entrance to higher education. The right of access to higher education has thus gone from a pure guarantee (1990s) to a process of drawing lots in certain sectors (APB) then to a right of appeal a posteriori to the rectorate for the student e without assignment (Parcoursup). If the existence of selection procedures does not necessarily turn into real selectivity, this development radically modifies the compromise of social justice in terms of selection at the entrance to the French higher education system, namely that its selective nature is traditionally offset by a “pocket” of non-selectivity in university licenses.

Slow and very insidious, these three mechanisms gradually change the study experience; they accentuate the financial dependence of students vis-à-vis their family even as the benefits in terms of professional integration become more uncertain (see previous section). It is with this analysis in mind that the following section should be read. It shows a relative specificity of France in terms of the influence of diplomas, namely the importance of the initial diploma and its consequences on social reproduction.

Segregative democratization and growing intragenerational inequalities

Educational expansion does not systematically translate into more egalitarian access to diplomas and knowledge. This reality has imposed itself in France under the expression of “segregative democratization”:

“democratization”, in the sense of mass access to a level of education; “segregative” to indicate that the forms taken by this level are multiple and variously valued socially. To a quantitative evolution - always more pupils - opposes a qualitative evolution - of the pupils in which streams? If the middle school level has been consolidated in a relatively equalizing way (with the "single college", even unfinished), the massification of the high school constitutes the most explicit illustration of segregative democratization, with the development of technological and professional streams whose academic and social legitimacy does not reach that of the general stream.

In higher education, this segregation phenomenon is amplified by the wide variety of training offered. Consequently, social inequalities are no longer played out on access - most general baccalaureate graduates go on to higher education - but rather on the distinctions between institutions (universities versus grandes écoles) and fields (sciences versus humanities for example), in view of the social prestige and academic excellence of the courses.

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Social inequalities therefore have many educational consequences. But to understand the role played by massification in the reproduction of social inequalities, we must also look at the social effects of educational inequalities. Indeed, the more the initial diploma determines access to social positions, the more the School favors the production of social inequalities: we then speak of school influence or diplomas. From this point of view, France holds a particularly strong position: the initial diploma plays a preponderant role in the labor market there, and the return to long-term training remains statistically very infrequent compared to other European countries. This influence of diplomas on individuals hardens academic competition and reinforces family strategies, socially marked, to achieve better academic positions, legitimized afterwards by diplomas opening up to favorable social positions.

This tendency of modern societies to consider as fair and effective access to social positions on the basis of diplomas has its reverse: the intensification of academic competition. In countries where the weight of the initial diploma is decisive, this disadvantage becomes critical. Educational expansion, which is not equalizing by nature, then accentuates the segregative nature of the system, by mobilizing families and young people around an over-investment in school: private lessons, orientation coaching, public competition. and private, choice of "paying" extracurricular activities...

The fruit of a society where initial academic merit is king is not necessarily a society of academic excellence. This academic hyper-competition does not necessarily produce very high educational inequalities. On the other hand, it leads to very strong social inequalities, namely educational inequalities according to the social origin of the children. This is what the PISA results show, survey after survey. The Ministry of National Education thus underlines that "the score gap between the best performing students and the least performing students remained stable between 2009 and 2018 while being significantly higher than on average in the countries of the OECD. France is the OECD country whose performance is most strongly linked to the economic, social and cultural status (ESCS) of students”.

In a French society where social inequalities at school are easily transformed into legitimate social inequalities, via the seal of the diploma, a form of social consensus nevertheless emerges to make school the heart of the meritocratic ideal. And it is not lifelong training that can offer individuals a second chance. Few adults go back to long-term studies and continuing education for thirty years has been based on a tendency to reduce the length of training and on very strong inequalities according to level of education and socio-professional category: on average, one no - a graduate completes 9 hours of training per year when a long-term higher education graduate completes 26; similarly, an employee takes 14 hours of training while a manager takes an average of 282.

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(*) By Nicolas Charles, Sociologist, University of Bordeaux