  This paper analyses the framing and expression of French high school
students' aspirations. It sheds new light on the inequalities in tracking
between academic versus technological and vocational track. Through the
analysis of a national survey and a corpus of cover letters written by
applicants for a sociology degree, it shows that, due to the lack of means,
teachers mainly have two types of guidance support strategies.Teachers use to
target and concentrate their supporting on ``good students'' in vocational
tracks, while, in academic tracks, they delegate some steps of the tracking
procedures to families. These different strategies have effects on the way high
school students internalise school prescriptions and restitute them in cover
letters. Through the close support they benefit from teachers, ``good
students'' in vocational tracks strongly internalise the instructions and their
place in the school hierarchy. In academic tracks, students' expression of the
aspirations is much more dependent of their familial capital.
