Conference Program

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of research conducted since 2023 on the emergence of a new private higher education sector in France known as “bachelors”, an English literal translation of the French term “licence” used to refer to a private equivalent of the first cycle of university studies in France. However, these programs do not correspond to any defined degree and exploit a vague regulatory framework (Ingrao, 2025), allowing for a variety of recognition, ranging from no recognition to equivalence to a licence, including professional titles and the possibility of work-study programs made possible by the 2018 reform of apprenticeships in France.

These are expensive programs, costing an average of €10,000 per year, offering training in various sectors such as business, management, engineering, art and audiovisual professions, as well as IT and environmental issues. “Bachelors” are presented as a private neoliberal alternative (van Zanten, 2019) to the traditional French higher education system and therefore fall between public universities and the French system of Grandes Écoles, both public and private. Given their cost (equivalent to private Grandes Écoles programs) and their marketing strategy, which presents them as an alternative to a public higher education system that is portrayed as lacking in individual support and professional integration, the emergence of this new private higher education sector raises questions about the resulting reconfigurations of socioeconomic inequalities within French higher education.

So, which students enroll in “bachelor's” programs? Do they represent a new pathway for middle- and upper-class children with economic capital? Or, conversely, thanks in particular to the apprenticeship mechanism, do they represent a form of access to higher education for a new student population (Lemistre, 2021)?

To answer these questions, this work draws on a mixed method approach that seeks to understand the supply and demand for “bachelors” in France, combining observations, web scraping, and survey data. I draw on 30 hours of ethnographic observation at student fairs. I also draw on a corpus of 518 files presenting “bachelor's” programs, compiled using a method of automatic online data extraction from two program directories for 2023-2024: Parcoursup (listing all public higher education programs after the baccalaureate, as well as some private programs) and Parcourprivé, the private platform offered by the French National Federation of Private Education. Finally, I draw on the secondary use of data from the Céreq Génération 2021 survey, which studies the career paths and professional integration of those who have left the education system since 2021.

This research shows thus that “French bachelors” represent a real social intermediary between universities, which are absorbing the influx of students from the third wave of mass education (Coulangeon, 2008), and the Grandes Écoles, which are still very socially unjust (Bataille & Falcon, 2018). They tend to attract students from a less privileged middle class that is more ethno-racially diverse than the elite, but still seeking to distinguish themselves from the new university populations (Bodin & Orange, 2018).