Higher Education and Social Mobility in France

Book excerpt: This book offers an in-depth sociological exploration of the social trajectories and experiences of children of post-colonial immigrants in France who are embarking on paths of extreme upward intergenerational mobility. The author draws on life history interviews with young adults of North African immigrant background, enrolled at or having recently graduated from the country’s elite higher education institutions, the grandes écoles, to delve into largely under-researched pathways and give a voice to high-achieving members of a population that continues to be collectively associated with difficulties to ‘integrate’. The volume constitutes the first sociological study to document, from the individual actor’s perspective, the everyday experience of racism within France’s elite educational institutions and to reveal the upward mobility experience to be informed by the interlocking effects of racial processes, immigrant ancestry, class background, and gender. Challenging the pervasive representation of descendants of North African immigrants as ‘unsuccessful’ and ‘unable to integrate’, this book sheds light on the experiences of the largely silent upwardly mobile members of a stigmatized minority group, revealing the strategies used to respond to the constraints to their mobility and the importance of familial histories of post-colonial migration, characterized by the former generation’s efforts, sacrifices, and resilience, in informing these ‘success stories’.