If, in the 1970s and 1980s, ‘school failure’ was at the centre of school speeches in popular neighbourhoods, issues of ‘school violence’ or ‘school drop-out’ dominated the scene from the 1990s, especially with regard to the college presented as the ‘segment’ where school’s difficulties were concentrated. New attention is thus paid to school breaks, which first affect colleges from popular backgrounds. In this book, the authors reconstruct the school break paths of these colleges and analyse in turn the effect of several dimensions: precariousness and family breaks; school learning difficulties, conflicts with teachers, institutional sanctions; the juvenile sociability that oscillates between isolation and attraction of the peer group. Rejecting the vain quest for a single cause, they insist on the articulation between these different dimensions and show the sequencing of processes within several collegiate backgrounds. Based on a two-year intensive survey, this book discusses issues that deeply slow down the school and feed into the debate on the “single college”. It also provides limited knowledge of the worsening of the living conditions of a proportion of popular families and of its effects in terms of schooling and socialisation. It is aimed at all those involved in school and social issues, as well as students and researchers in social sciences and education sciences.