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Over the past 15 years, French secondary and higher education has gone through unprecedented changes, with a steep rise in the number of secondary students and a geographical diffusion of university education throughout the territory. The present article undertakes to measure the effects, in one school district, of these morphological transformations on the access of different student categories to given sections of secondary and higher education. This new stage in the « democratization » of education does not prevent the continuation of the phenomena of production observed in the past and, in particular, the preservation of hierarchies at the cost of a displacement of the discrepancies. While there has been, in the last 15 years, a slight compression of the educational and social hierarchy in secondary school sections, the accompanying under-selection is actually a deferred selection that is transferred to the time of the student’s entry into higher education or beyond.