Thèse Trajectoires Scolaires des Élèves dans un Système Éducatif Stratifié H/F - Doctorat.Gouv.Fr

Établissement : Université Paris-Saclay GS Economie & Management École doctorale : Droit, Economie, Management Laboratoire de recherche : RITM - Réseaux Innovation Territoires et Mondialisation Direction de la thèse : Manon GARROUSTE ORCID 0000000325932376 Début de la thèse : 2026-10-01 Date limite de candidature : 2026-05-11T23:59:59 Les inégalités scolaires demeurent un enjeu central dans la plupart des pays de l'OCDE, malgré la massification de l'enseignement secondaire. En France, ce paradoxe est particulièrement marqué : si l'accès au lycée s'est largement développé, les trajectoires scolaires restent fortement déterminées par l'origine sociale. Comme l'a montré la littérature sur la démocratisation ségrégative, l'ouverture de l'accès au baccalauréat s'est accompagnée d'une différenciation accrue entre les filières. Les élèves issus de milieux favorisés sont davantage orientés vers la voie générale, tandis que les élèves d'origine modeste sont surreprésentés dans les voies technologique et surtout professionnelle, souvent associée à un moindre prestige scolaire et à des perspectives plus limitées. Dans ce contexte, les politiques compensatoires, en particulier l'éducation prioritaire, visent à réduire ces inégalités, mais leurs effets apparaissent contrastés, notamment dans le second degré. Ces constats soulèvent une question centrale : dans quelle mesure les politiques éducatives peuvent-elles réellement modifier les trajectoires des élèves défavorisés dans un système scolaire socialement stratifié ?Cette thèse vise à contribuer à ce débat en apportant des résultats empiriques nouveaux sur la manière dont les politiques éducatives façonnent les trajectoires des élèves. Si les politiques compensatoires, et notamment l'éducation prioritaire, ont fait l'objet de nombreuses publications, leurs effets restent hétérogènes et les interactions entre dispositifs compensatoires demeurent encore peu étudiées. Quant à elles, les réformes de la voie professionnelle ont fait l'objet de beaucoup moins d'analyses empiriques que les politiques compensatoires, malgré le fait que ces deux ensembles de politiques concernent largement les mêmes publics. Dans ce contexte, la thèse analysera d'abord l'articulation entre politiques compensatoires, en étudiant les effets de la superposition entre éducation prioritaire et quartiers prioritaires de la politique de la ville (QPV), afin de déterminer si leur cumul génère des complémentarités ou renforce au contraire des mécanismes de stigmatisation, d'évitement scolaire et de ségrégation. Ce premier chapitre permettra de poser le cadre d'analyse du projet et de mieux caractériser les populations étudiées, en mettant en évidence les mécanismes territoriaux et sociaux qui structurent leurs trajectoires. Elle s'intéressera ensuite aux déterminants de l'orientation vers la voie professionnelle, en mettant en évidence le rôle des effets de pairs dans les choix de spécialité. Enfin, elle proposera une évaluation causale de la réforme de 2023 de la voie professionnelle, en examinant l'impact des gratifications de stage, des incitations financières destinées aux enseignants et des transformations de l'offre locale de formation sur l'attractivité de cette voie et sur les trajectoires des élèves.

Sur le plan méthodologique, le projet mobilisera des méthodes économétriques quasi-expérimentales, combinant des approches en différences-en-différences et des méthodes spatiales exploitant les variations géographiques d'exposition aux politiques. L'objectif sera d'identifier des effets causaux et de mieux comprendre les mécanismes à l'oeuvre.

Ce travail vise ainsi à contribuer à la fois à la littérature académique et au débat public, en apportant des éclairages originaux sur l'efficacité des dispositifs destinés à réduire les inégalités éducatives et, plus largement, sur les mécanismes de formation des inégalités dans les trajectoires scolaires des publics vulnérables.
Over the past decades, most OECD countries have experienced a substantial expansion of secondary education. While this process has widened access to upper secondary qualifications and encouraged longer schooling trajectories, it has not necessarily reduced social inequalities in educational outcomes. In many countries, educational systems remain characterized by a strong correlation between social background and academic achievement. Numerous studies, as well as international assessments such as PISA, highlight the persistence of this relationship (OECD, 2023a).

France provides a particularly relevant case study in this respect. As shown by Merle (2000), the French education system has undergone a process of segregative democratization: access to the high school diploma has expanded, yet educational tracks remain strongly socially stratified. Recent evidence (Depp, 2025a) confirms the persistence of these inequalities, with disadvantaged students disproportionately enrolled in vocational education (Mettetal, 2020).

In response to these inequalities, France has developed compensatory education policies, the most prominent of which is priority education (éducation prioritaire), introduced in 1981. This policy allocates additional resources to socially and academically disadvantaged schools, with the aim of reducing inequalities linked to students' social and territorial background. However, empirical evidence on its effectiveness remains mixed. While some studies provide encouraging results under specific conditions such as Machin et al. (2004) for the UK Excellence in Cities programme or Dobbie and Fryer (2011) for the Harlem Children's Zone, most empirical studies in secondary education find limited effects on reducing achievement gaps (Meuret, 1994; Caille, 2001; Leuven et al., 2007; Bénabou et al., 2004; Van der Klaauw, 2008; Beffy and Davezies, 2013; Gary-Bobo et al., 2016; Caille et al., 2016; Stéfanou, 2017). Beyond academic outcomes, a growing literature highlights the role of behavioural responses. Parental school choice plays a key role in shaping school composition. Using administrative data from England, Burgess et al. (2015) show that parents strongly prefer schools with higher academic performance and more advantaged peer composition, leading to avoidance of disadvantaged schools. In the context of priority education, the labeling of schools may reinforce these dynamics (Govind et al., 2024; Andersson et al., 2026). Such mechanisms can generate school and residential avoidance strategies, particularly among advantaged households, thereby weakening social mix and increasing segregation (Davezies and Garrouste, 2020; Garrouste and Lafourcade, 2022). Other studies focus on teachers and school inputs. Financial incentives in priority education areas have been shown to improve teacher retention and working conditions (Prost, 2013; Benhenda, 2020; Silhol and Wilner, 2023). At the primary education level, recent policies such as class-size halving have also generated positive effects on student achievement (Depp, 2021). Overall, however, the literature suggests that while some targeted interventions are effective, priority education policies have struggled to substantially reduce inequalities at the secondary level.

Faced with these persistent inequalities, a wide range of policy instruments have been implemented over the past decades as part of a broader effort to reduce social inequalities in education. Beyond priority education, other place-based policies have been developed to target disadvantaged populations, notably urban policies focusing on deprived neighbourhoods, such as urban priority areas (quartiers prioritaires de la politique de la ville, QPV). Although these policies rely on different institutional frameworks, they often target similar populations and territories. As a result, they may overlap and simultaneously affect the same students through different channels. The first chapter of this doctoral research will examine the interaction between priority education policies and urban policies such as QPV, in order to better understand how these overlapping interventions influence students' educational outcomes.

Alongside compensatory policies, vocational education plays a central role in shaping educational trajectories. A large body of international literature shows that tracking systems tend to reinforce educational inequalities (Hanushek and Wossmann, 2006; Brunello and Checchi, 2007), with vocational tracks disproportionately enrolling disadvantaged students (Shavit and Muller, 2000). In France, vocational education has progressively shifted from a pathway providing occupational qualifications to a track associated with academic difficulty and social disadvantage (Grignon, 1971). Although the introduction of the vocational baccalauréat in 1985 aimed to improve students' qualifications and labour market prospects, vocational education remains socially stratified. Sociological and economic studies suggest that orientation toward vocational education is often a constrained process, shaped by social background, expectations, and peer environments (Poullaouec, 2010; Troger, 2008; Guyon and Huillery, 2021), rather than a deliberate academic choice. Despite the importance of vocational education, it has received much less attention in the empirical literature than compensatory education policies, even though both target similar populations. This thesis contributes to filling this gap, with Chapters 2 and 3 focusing on vocational education.

Taken together, these elements highlight the need for a better understanding of the role of education policies in shaping the educational trajectories of disadvantaged students in a socially stratified education system.
This doctoral research project aims to contribute to the understanding of how education policies shape the educational trajectories of disadvantaged students in a socially stratified secondary education system. It focuses on compensatory education policies and vocational education, and seeks to identify the mechanisms through which these policies affect students' outcomes and orientation decisions. To achieve this, the doctoral research project contributes to the literature in the following ways:
- This project will contribute to the literature on compensatory education by examining the local implementation of policies through overlapping targeting. It will study the interaction between priority education and urban policy areas (Quartiers prioritaires de la ville, QPV), and will assess whether joint exposure generates complementarities or, conversely, a form of double stigma.
- It will contribute to the literature on educational choices and peer effects by investigating the determinants of orientation toward vocational education. The analysis will focus on whether track and specialization choices reflect individual preferences or are constrained by social environment and peer composition. The doctoral research will provide new evidence on peer effects in vocational education, a setting where social interactions are likely to be particularly strong, and will examine how these effects vary by socioeconomic background and gender, potentially reinforcing existing inequalities.
- The research will contribute to the emerging literature on vocational education reforms by providing one of the first causal evaluations of the 2023 reform of vocational education in France. It will assess the impact of three policy instruments: paid internships for students, pay-for-performance incentives for teachers, and the modernization of the local supply of training, on the attractiveness of vocational education and on students' outcomes. Finally, this third chapter will contribute to the evaluation of public policies by adopting a cost-effectiveness perspective. It will assess whether the resources allocated to these policies translate into meaningful improvements in educational and labor market outcomes, and will compare the relative effectiveness of different policy instruments.
This project adopts a quantitative and policy-oriented approach to analyze how education policies affect the trajectories of disadvantaged students. It relies on large-scale administrative data combining detailed information on students' academic performance, educational choices, and socioeconomic background, with fine-grained geographic data on their residential location, school environments, and exposure to public policies.

The empirical strategy uses quasi-experimental methods to identify causal effects, exploiting both spatial and temporal variations in policy exposure. In particular, the project will compare students exposed to different policies due to their location, as well as cohorts of students before and after major policy reforms. These approaches make it possible to approximate what would have happened in the absence of the policy and to isolate its impact from other confounding factors.

Special attention is given to social interactions and local contexts, which play a key role in shaping educational choices and may amplify or limit the effects of public policies.

The project also incorporates a cost-effectiveness perspective, the Marginal Value of Public Funds (Hendren and Sprung-Keyser, 2020), aiming to assess whether the resources devoted to these policies translate into meaningful improvements in students' educational and labor-market outcomes.

Le·a candidat·e doit être titulaire d'un Master en économie quantitative. Une très bonne maîtrise des méthodes économétriques de l'évaluation des politiques publiques est nécessaire, ainsi qu'une très bonne maîtrise des logiciels de traitement et d'analyse statistique des données (R et/ou Stata). Une bonne connaissance des outils et de la manipulation des données géographiques (QGis ou R) est attendue. Une très bonne connaissance du système éducatif français et du contexte institutionnel est nécessaire. Une expérience professionnelle avérée dans le domaine de l'évaluation des politiques publiques et/ou de l'analyse coût-efficacité des politiques serait un atout. Une très bonne maîtrise de l'anglais rédactionnel est requise.