Access to higher education in Quebec: The impact of the education market

This article aims to show that the stratification of the Quebec secondary education market leads to further social inequalities in higher education. The results obtained from a sample (N=2,677) drawn from a cohort of students born in 1984, and observed up to the age of 22, reveal that the influence of social origin on access to higher education operates mainly through the type of secondary school attended: private school, state school with only conventional curricula and state school offering enriched curricula (in mathematics, science or languages). Students from private schools or state schools with enriched curricula are significantly more likely to move on to college and university education than their peers who have attended a state institution offering only regular curricula. The analyses show that the likelihood of attending a private or state school offering enriched curricula is strongly correlated with the social origin of the student. The influence of the education market operates through the differences in performance and educational aspirations that characterize students in the three types of school.