Pathways to higher education : social and gender influences

This paper explores the extent to which educational pathways in France and Switzerland facilitate access to higher education for male and female youths from lower cultural capital backgrounds (whose parents have not experienced themselves higher education), thus being the first of their families to follow higher education. We use panel data in the two countries to analyze the access to different pathways to higher education. Our multinomial logistic regression models show two different educational pathways with regard to social reproduction and gender inequalities. In France, vocationally oriented pathways foster higher education access for women with lower cultural capital. In Switzerland …