The impact of individual secondary school on higher education choice

As the Indicators of education of the French Community of Belgium (2008) show it, it seems that most of the students ending Secondary education carry on with higher education. However, can we really talk about democratization? Inequalities of access, especially at the university level, still subsist. Our objective is to understand these inequalities of access. More precisely, this research investigates the impact of French Community Secondary school attended on higher education choices. Indeed, whereas the “school effectiveness research” (SER) has extensively shown the impact of school on academic achievement (Teddlie &Reynolds, 2000), few researches have documented the impact of Secondary school attended on the choices for higher education (Duru-Bellat & al., 2004, Nakhili, 2005 and Pustjens & al., 2004).
So, we study the impact of Secondary school on educational choices after Secondary school. We also try to see if these differences between schools persist after controlling gender, socio-cultural origin and schools careers. Finally we attempt to see if variables as school social intake and percentage of students in academic tracks can be appropriate factors to explain differences between schools. Here, we study the choice to go to university only. Results show that choosing university or not significantly differs between schools. Even if individuals’ characteristics (gender, SES, tracks and grade repetition) and school characteristics (% of academic education and school’s socio-economic status) are taken into account, Secondary schools still significantly differ in the educational choice their students made.