“I Became an Engineer by Accident!”: Engineering, Vocation, and Professional Values

Abstract

Contrary to many other countries, in France, engineering education remains attractive. Paradoxically, French students do not seem to be motivated by the engineering profession and many graduates seem to have become engineers “by accident”. The outcome of our research is that engineering students are “pushed” by an invisible parental and social pressure. The most successful ones end up in a very few prestigious schools, which are supposed to open the doors of the higher management positions in big private companies and public administration, the great majority in a school they have hardly heard about before the “concours”, with little motivation for applied science, hardly any vocation for engineering. This work is at the crossroad of two developing approaches within the fields of educational sciences and sociology: the choice to study successful students belonging to the upper or upper middle class which are less investigated than lower classes, and the choice to adopt a qualitative approach, while most researches about orientation are based on wide quantitative surveys. Our aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the construction of the engineers’ culture and ethos, through an analysis of the socialization process from the engineering students’ point of view.