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…

This article discusses the methodological challenges of researching elite boys' schooling, in a study involving interviewing alumni who attended these schools from the 1970s to the 2020s. In particular, through a feminist poststructuralist methodological framing, it considers the necessity for researcher reflexivity in engaging in research in such…

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 essay uses Paulo Freire as inspiration of thinking about the limits and possibilities of building bridges between elite universities in the Global North and communities around the world given the historic and present-day entanglements between these universities and empire, colonisation, and epistemic violence. It sheds lights on how…

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…

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…

As U.S. elite independent schools become more racially inclusive, white students may perceive a shift in their social position. Using qualitative data from school climate surveys at 10 such schools, 2014-2018, we explore how white adolescent boys experience these shifts emotionally. We find that a subset of particularly vocal white boys express…

Higher education in the United States has evolved to expand its reach to various diverse student populations. The student cohort in higher education that has seen exponential growth over the past few decades at elite liberal arts colleges are students who served in the military. Veteran students can contribute greatly to communities of elite…

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…

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 study seeks to investigate curricular trends in MOOCs and institutional participation in the development of MOOC courses. The study is framed utilizing the theoretical lenses of academic capitalism and isomorphism--particularly Riesman's conceptualization of a "snake-like procession" of isomorphism in American higher education lead…

How do students at elite universities think about the economic and educational returns of their college education? Drawing on 29 interviews from first-year students at an elite university, I find that students think that attending an elite university will allow them to secure a high degree of social status, which they believe is integral to…