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Higher education systems in developed countries face a contradictory injunction: to select students while maintaining a relative openness of opportunities. In order to respond simultaneously to these two somehow opposing goals, the four countries studied in this article (Germany, England, France, Sweden) are developing a variety of social justice solutions. By analysing the public action mechanisms for access to higher education, we show that the countries are divided into two dimensions: their conception of merit—on which criteria are students selected?—and the mechanisms for compensating selection—how is a relative openness of opportunities maintained despite selection? The article leads to a typology of the implicit conceptions of social justice in higher education systems and invites to question their recent dynamics.