Les mécomptes du supérieur - « Autres » écoles, « autres » établissements et « autres » formations

Miscalculations of Higher Education - “Other” Schools, “Other” Institutions and “Other” Curriculums - The aim of this article is to analyze the construction by the tools and categories of ministerial statistics of a certain vision of higher education and its transformations, to which sociologists are subjected. The explosion of “other higher education curriculums” since the 1960s seems to compete with the situation of the universities. On one hand, the evolution of the latter category has to do with the improvement and expansion of investigative surveys. On the other, it is the product of the internal redistribution of training previously recorded in other categories. The use generally made of this class (“Other Curriculums”) tends to forget that this is a particularly heterogeneous aggregate including blurred and shifting boundaries, which are less the expression of real developments than the product of symbolic struggles between sectors and efforts to create distinctions.