Conference Program

Sciences Po Paris is a prestigious French higher education institution—a grande école—and a key site for the training of the country’s political and administrative elites (Parodi, Périvier, Larat, 2023).

For the past fifteen years, we have conducted research on this institution from the perspective of the sociology of educational inequalities (Oberti, Sanselme and Voisin, 2010; Oberti, 2013; Oberti and Pavie, 2020; Rossignol-Brunet et al., 2022; Pavie et al., 2024). In 2022, at the request of the institution, we began an evaluation of a reform of the admission procedures to this highly selective institution.

In this paper, we adopt a reflexive perspective on our position as researchers in relation to the institution and its transformations, as well as on the ways in which our work has been received and used within it.

The case of Sciences Po is particularly noteworthy because the institution grants its own researchers extensive access to administrative data, an arrangement that has no equivalent in the French higher education landscape and that therefore deserves analysis in its own right.

The numerous studies produced on the institution have been appropriated internally, though not always at the highest levels of the institutional hierarchy. While our findings were initially expected to inform governance and decisions regarding admission procedures—particularly with a view to reducing social, territorial, and gender inequalities—a new reform of the entrance examination was ultimately introduced alongside the publication of our report (Oberti, Pavie and Rossignol-Brunet, 2024), moving in the opposite direction to our recommendations.

This paper seeks to shed light on this apparent paradox by highlighting the political, media, and institutional dynamics at stake. In particular, we emphasize the key role played by successive directors of the institution in shaping responses to this research, ranging from integration to rejection or indifference.

Lobbying by various pressure groups—most notably the principals of elite Parisian high schools—also contributed to steering the reform in a direction contrary to our findings and recommendations. This occurred despite the fact that some actors within the institution (including student representatives and members of the administration) mobilized our results in an attempt to influence internal power relations.

We nevertheless show that it was possible to preserve both our scientific agenda and the conduct of our research, thanks to the guarantees provided by our institutional status and the protections established by the formal agreement governing the project.