Beneath the veneer of prestige and promise, a hidden issue pervades the campuses of America's selective universities. In "Starving the Dream," Nathan F. Alleman, Cara Cliburn Allen, and Sarah E. Madsen reveal the startling contradiction between the celebrated opportunities of these prestige-oriented institutions and the food insecurity…

Although internationalisation underpins many practices in higher education, its adopted approaches can be uneven between institutions and create ambiguous conceptualisations of how it is enacted in practice. Therefore, a whole-sector analysis can provide insight into whether spaces exist for new and innovative approaches to internationalisation,…

Selecting a major is a critical decision for undergraduate students, yet research on their decision-making processes within the Chinese context remains limited. Using cultural capital and the dual-process model of culture in action as theoretical frameworks, this study examines the major selection processes of 45 first-year students at two elite…

This article examines the strategies of a 'new rich' class in China to transmit advantages to their children through admission into highly ranked overseas universities. In-depth interviews were conducted with parents (n = 16) and students (n = 60) at international high schools that cater to the local population in Shenzhen. The findings…

Internships have become an important means to enhance career prospects in an increasingly congested graduate labour market. This article used positional conflict theory to explore how university students from different social class backgrounds experience internships, and the implications for inequalities in post-graduation employment. One-hundred…

This article aims to examine the employment prospects of graduates from Sino-foreign cooperative universities (SFCUs) compared with those from local Chinese universities. Drawing on the annual employment quality reports released by six SFCUs, the findings indicated that SFCU graduates had distinct advantages in terms of both further study and…

This article extends Bourdieu's convertibility of different forms of capital to understand the patterns of study abroad by elite graduates from Peking University, China. We draw upon empirical data from a first-hand survey study involving 1,417 graduates from Peking University. The statistical analyses suggest a pattern of the conversions from…

Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of the competition for economic, social and cultural capitals within educational fields, this article reports empirical research from 49 in-depth interviews with graduate students at four elite universities in the USA and the UK. It argues the brands of elite global universities work to reproduce social and…

Our paper reveals a significant under-reported emergent phenomenon: the graduates of the well-established 'Elite Traditional International Schools' worldwide are beginning to cluster in certain universities, in certain 'global cities'. As one might expect, New York and London are central to this clustering, alongside Boston, Toronto and Vancouver.…

As nations continue to use OECD data to ensure preparedness for global competitiveness, questions concerning how inequality is constructed and maintained in different nations are critical. Drawing on Bourdieu and Savage, I argue that social capital continues to perpetuate social inequality both prior to and during university attendance despite…

The study of elites is enjoying a revival at a time of increasing economic inequality. Sociologists of education have been leaders in this area, researching how affluent families position their children to compete favorably in a highly stratified higher education system. However, scholars have done less research on how students do symbolic work of…

This article draws from American research on ''concerted cultivation'' to compare the parenting logics of 41 upper-middle-class parents in Toronto, Canada. We consider not only how parents structure their children's after-school time (what parents do) but also how the broader ecology of schooling informs their parenting logics (how they…

As universities in the Anglophone world attend to operating on a global stage, linguistic diversity in the sector has intensified. Historically, higher education has adopted language-as-problem orientations to managing linguistic diversity, viewing multilingual repertoires largely as an obstacle. An emerging body of work informed by…

Harvard is easily the most recognizable American institution of higher education, freighted with rich associations to the nation's leaders. This article provides an opportunity to examine the history of higher education through a lens often overlooked--fiction. By doing so, the authors provide a richer understanding of a particular institution and…