This paper explores the way in which elite students from Germany and Romania understand the role of talent, effort, and structural factors in shaping educational success and failure. The image of a successful student aligns with the requirements of the selection processes, with Romanian students emphasising effort, and German students projecting…

Higher education institutions (HEIs) engage more and more in branding activities to sustain an advantage in an increasingly high competitive environment. In such a pressing managerial context, research on brand management in the specific context of higher education expanded over the past few years. While research indicates that brand authenticity…

In England and Wales, fee-charging independent schools can be legally classified as charities and, therefore, receive associated benefits, the most obvious being taxation advantages. The high fees charged by many of these schools create financial exclusivity, which, it will be seen, confers significant social and cultural capital to those who can…

This article employs critical discourse analysis of the Spear's Schools Index of 'the best private schools in the world', the first such global ranking of schools, to understand representations of elite education in globalised societies. It argues that the Index is a powerful text that exemplifies a global gaze -- an imagined perspective from…

Research on student selection mostly focuses on accepted applicants and the effects of selection procedures. In this sense, most samples seem to be biased, which is well-reflected in the literature. The present study investigates student selection regarding students who had been initially de-selected but finally succeeded in the admission process.…

This article investigates the awarding of scholarships to students from historically disadvantaged communities to attend elite schools in South Africa. Specifically, the article analyses the narrated accounts of former scholarship recipients who reflect on their experiences of entering an elite secondary school as scholarship students. Using…

Research has long demonstrated the exclusion and Othering experienced by young people with disabilities in education. This paper presents findings from an ethnographic study conducted in an 'elite' sixth-form college in England, set against the backdrop of a shifting social, political, and cultural landscape, where neo-liberal discourses of…

Inequalities in access to elite higher education institutions are central in the horizontal dimension of social stratification in higher education. Previous studies have consistently shown large social inequalities in access from French "grandes écoles" (GE), but there is limited empirical evidence on the effect of alternative admission…

Historically, the Swedish school system has been designed to level out differences between pupils. There has also been scepticism about assessing pupils. However, new school reforms in Sweden centre on performance and tests. This article focuses on pupils (year 6) in Swedish elite schools and their perceptions of assessment. The pupils are in an…

The emergency of switching to an online learning model due to the COVID pandemic impacted the educational process in of schools world wide. We conducted an anonymous survey at the elite high schools in Serbia whose students won 45 medals at international Olympiads in mathematics, physics, and computer sciences in the last 4-year period…

Applying a Bourdieusian lens, this study seeks to explore the interactions between secondary and higher education and how these interactions impact marginalised students in an elite university in China. It presents accounts of the educational experiences of 13 marginalised students of rural origin. The findings suggest that for them educational…

Home BAME students are under-represented on postgraduate courses in England, especially at elite universities, however, there has been little research on why this should be. This research starts to fill this gap, arguing that gatekeepers to postgraduate courses at some of the most elite universities contribute to maintaining white supremacy.…

This paper explores the process of transnational institutional matching between elite institutions in Singapore and Great Britain, and the role of state-sponsored scholarships in enabling this process as political and administrative elites are selected and groomed. Using data gathered from in-depth interviews conducted with Singaporean…

Competitively allocated research funds, from both public and private sources, constitute an increasing share of university revenues. The article investigates empirically, using data on the Italian university system, whether structural and strategic features of universities--such as size, age and especially the importance that they assign to their…

The past decade has seen the emergence, predominantly in Thailand and mainland China, of a form of educational institution that has had little scholarly attention or generic identification. This paper shows how the ad hoc and opportunistic franchising of elite English private schools, beginning with the hyper-capitalist exportation of the Dulwich…