Context

This presentation will analyze the practices of high school students seeking information and advice on the Internet to elaborate their higher education (HE) choices and the effect of these practices on social inequalities. Access to information and advice is crucial in this transition (Plank and Jordan, 2001), especially in countries such as France where the HE landscape is characterized by a wide variety of tracks and institutions with different status and has become more complex and opaque due to the recent growth of private higher education institutions (HEIs), which now attract almost 20% of students.    

Students’ use of the Internet is encouraged in the French context by three additional factors: 1) the limited and unequal degree of information and advice on their HE choices that they get in schools (Oliver et al., 2018); 2) the increasing offer of HE guidance and counseling proposed on the Internet by private agencies and the voluntary sector alongside government agencies to fill this gap; 3) the introduction in 2009 of an Internet platform centralizing students’ HE choices and HEIs offers and recommendations where students can also get access to standard and customized information on HE.

Research questions, literature review and theoretical framework

The research questions that this presentation will address are situated at the intersection of two research areas. The first concerns inequalities in access to HE. In the French context, various studies have highlighted the diversity of students’ HE choices according to their social background. To explain this phenomenon, researchers have pointed out the role of academic results and tracks followed in secondary school as well as of the location of schools and HEIs in ‘channeling’ students into certain HE fields, tracks and institutions (Duru-Bellat et Kieffer, 2008; Convert, 2010; Frouillou, 2015).

Contrary to research in other countries, these studies have shown little interest for the actors and devices that affect the decision-making process in more immediate ways. There is now a relatively important international literature on the role of parents and peers (Buchman and Dalton, 2002) and of educational professionals (McDonough, 1997) but only a small one on the role of institutional devices such as brochures and open doors events (Reay et al. 2005; Slack et al., 2014). In our own research, we have chosen to combine the study of network, institutional and market actors and devices. One of the impersonal devices we have chosen to focus on, alongside semi-personal ones such as HEIs’ open doors and HE fairs (van Zanten and Legavre, 2014; van Zanten and Oliver, 2017), is the web.

The second research area concerns youth inequalities in the use of digital devices. If there is now a new generation’ of ‘digital natives’ that is youngsters who are immersed in an environment in which digital technologies are omnipresent and who have culturally-specific digital practices, research shows that socioeconomic background still has an impact on: differences in equipment; differences in the precociousness of regular usage of digital devices (Mercklé and Octobre, 2012); differences concerning the use of digital media for academic work or play and sociability (Gire and Granjeon, 2012). Taking stock of the results of these studies, but also of research on social inequalities in learning processes among youngsters (Bautier and Rochex, 1998), we seek to highlight differences in the cognitive and social usage of the web.

To understand students’ digital practices concerning the use of the Internet for information and advice on HE, how these practices are influenced by differences and inequalities between them and how they might in turn reduce, maintain or reinforce those differences and inequalities, we have used two methodological strategies. The first has been to gather data on the one hand on students’ use of the Internet and, on the other, on students’ characteristics and practices and on the schools they attend. In order to collect information on these different dimensions, we selected 6 lycées (upper-secondary schools) in the Parisian region differing on four main characteristics: their location (1 in Paris, 3 in cities close to Paris, 2 in cities far from Paris); institutional status (5 public and 1 private); types of secondary school tracks offered (2 lycées offering only academic and technological tracks; 4 offering also vocational tracks); their social composition (3 with a large proportion of upper-class students, 1 mixed, 2 with a large proportion of lower-class students). These lycées also differ in their counseling practices, a dimension that we are presently exploring through interviews with head teachers. In these lycées we asked all Terminale (Year 12) students to gather information and advice about their preferred HE options during 40 minutes using the school computers on which we had inserted a device recording their different steps on the Internet. Students were then asked to complete a short questionnaire including questions about their HE plans, their Internet practices and their academic and social characteristics. While students were accomplishing these tasks we observed and recorded some of their practices and conversations. The second strategy was to focus on Internet provision. After having established a list of the main websites offering information and advice on HE, we analyzed them on the basis of their content (targeted audience, types of information…) and technical characteristics (webpage design, use of videos and social media, etc) (Barats, 2016). In our presentation we will focus only on the similarities and differences between the two websites more frequently reached by students either because they explicitly searched for them or because the keywords or the search engine they used to navigate the Internet led students to them (as Google was used by almost all students, we plan exploring in the future how Google’s algorithm Page Rank cognitively and socially influenced access to these various websites (Cardon, 2013)).

The ongoing analysis of these different types of data will allow us to show: Students’ strategies: -The influence of high school students’ individual characteristics (gender, SES, academic level) on both the types of web pages and websites accessed and the type of search conducted (in terms of degree of planning, precision, complexity, etc) - The degree to which the differences between students on the basis of these characteristics are reinforced or reduced depending on their HE plans on the one hand, and their Internet skills on the other - The degree to which the effects of these various dimensions are mediated by differences between schools concerning both their objective characteristics and their practices concerning counseling students for their transition to higher education Internet provision: -The ways in which variations in students’ search strategies influence the amount, quality or type of information and advice that they gather -More precisely, the ways in which these strategies lead them to websites providing different types of advice on HEIs, on HE choices, experiences and careers, on future professions, etc.

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