Parcours d’étudiants

[Trajectories of higher education students], Philippe Cordazzo (ed.)

France currently has over 2.6 million higher education students. In a context of mass higher education and successive reforms, the training, occupational futures, and living conditions of students constitute major issues that require detailed analyses. It is crucial to study connections between student living conditions, transitions to adulthood, and trajectories.

This work offers a panoramic view of the different methods for analyzing student trajectories, together with findings and comparisons. It differs from other works on the subject by the diversity of sources and approaches used, which not only makes study of this group particularly rich and productive but also allows for discussing an extremely wide variety of topics. Entry into adulthood, couple formation, parenthood, leaving the parental home, internal and international mobility, occupational and career plans, material and financial conditions, transition from education to the labor market—all these aspects, all studied here, need to be taken into account if we are to analyze thoroughly the complexity of student trajectories, outcomes, and futures.

Several sources are used to identify the profiles of these trajectories. The first among them are surveys on student living conditions conducted by the Observatoire National de la Vie Étudiante. Tracking of birth cohorts also provides precious data on trajectories and the length of training taken, as do data collected by universities themselves from administrative databases and local surveys. Not to mention comparative data from international surveys (Eurostudent, Cheers, and Reflex) and qualitative life history analyses.

Acquiring detailed knowledge of higher education students, understanding the processes that shape their training and personal trajectories, requires in-depth study of the different data sources and application of the right measurement methods.

Philippe Codazzo is a professor of demography at the University of Strasbourg, where he occupies the position of assistant director of the SAGE research laboratory (Societies, Actors, Government in Europe). He is also an INED associated researcher. His work focuses on student trajectories from education to occupational integration, with specific attention to the transition to adulthood and the vulnerabilities associated with that process. He also specializes in data sources, comparability, and measurement methods. He is a member of the Groupe de Travail sur l’Enseignement Supérieur (GTES; Taskforce on higher education) and has contributed analyses of France’s Observatoire de la Vie Etudiante student living conditions survey since 2010.

Focus on:Parcours d’étudiants -Student trajectories: sources, issues, and research perspectives