It has become common understanding that universities are crucial for the production of elites in Western countries (Collins 1979; Bourdieu 1998). What however is less researched is how these organizations contribute to elite formation (c.f. Zald & Lounsboury 2010). Countries that are experiencing major transition within their higher education system can provide insights in such processes if stratificatory movements among universities and university programs have only recently gained pace (Teichler 2008). This is the case for Germany: Until the end of the 1990s it was characterized by, high regulation, homogenous degrees, a low number of freshmen students relative to their age cohort and a “fictitious corporative equality” (Kreckel 2010) between graduates from same-level degrees and universities. The last decade however has seen the overhaul of a large part of its degree structure through the Bologna-process, New Public Management reforms and a ‘radical horizontal differentiation’ between same-level degrees. As a consequence a specific form of higher education field is developing in which it is easier and more necessary to induce vertical differentiation – both through global and political institutions and from higher education organizations themselves (Bloch et al 2014). Germany thus provides the opportunity to study higher education stratification in statu nascendi.

Other than in vertically segmented higher education sectors, such as the UK or the US, it is not yet clear which university programs will strive and which will descend in reputation and along which aspects this will take place. Stratification thus is here less discussed as a fixed set of indicators along which educational reputation can be measured but rather as a specific “way of looking at change” (Trow, 1984: 132) in higher education. The presentation expands Trow’s perspective by taking social-material relations and organizational movement into account (c.f. Czarniawska 2013; Latour 2013). 

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