This paper investigates the conditions under which stakeholders in the higher education system in multilingual Switzerland link expectations of students' future economic to the development of human capital. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in a project focusing on mobile students crossing linguistic borders within Switzerland, I examine how…

The situation once described by Hoffmann (1985), in which children grow up exposed to three languages from an early age, is a reality for an increasing number of families. In Europe--as elsewhere--greater mobility is leading to greater numbers of mixed-language couples (Piller 2002), and, by extension, multilingual families. For such families,…