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This paper questions the role of the social division of space in the creation of social gaps in student populations across the sixteen public universities of the Île-de-France region. Interviews with students registered in Paris I (Paris) and Paris VIII (Saint-Denis) universities reveal the spatial isolation, social peer group and institutional constraints through which residential location affects university registrations. Apart from this importance of distance in recruitments combined with the socially contrasting location of the universities, such gaps between institutions result from a differentiation in students’emotional connection to place. Students’complex arbitrations (avoidance of some universities) reveal a social sense of position which relies on evolving educational and social capital. By analogy with research on secondary schools, this research interrogates the “university segregation” processes in Île-de-France.