Session Information
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper reconstructs the relevance and significance of different institutional levels in higher education for educational strategies of socially privileged/upper-class students in a case study in Germany against the backdrop of institutional change in the higher education system.
Whereas in other countries mechanisms of social reproduction in higher education are clearly embedded on the level of universities (e.g. elite universities) due to their pronounced vertical hierarchisation, this is less clear in Germany with its historical egalitarian higher education system. Although domestic policies and developments like the excellence initiative try to introduce stronger vertical stratification to enhance international competitiveness and visibility of German universities, the German higher education system is still considered relatively equal on the university level in comparison with other higher education systems (Deppe et al.2015)
Beyond the literature review on how the current German higher education system changes towards stronger stratification, we also base our empirical study on the theoretical framework of educational strategies, that we defined in our previous work. This draws heavily on Bourdieusian notion of implicit and explicit strategic behaviour and investment of habitus and economic and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984, 1990). Students from socially privileged background which we define as upper class students, bring a significant different set of capital configurations and habitus to the field of higher education, which usually remains invisible, because of their fit to the logic and rules higher education. However, changes on the macro level like massification and institutional stratification demand reconfigurations and repositioning of privileged students if they want to maintain their advantageous position.
Based on our earlier conceptualisation of educational strategies among upper-class students, we aiming to relate this concept stronger to the institutional changes on the meso level of higher education. We suspect that the horizontal and vertical differentiation on the meso level is mirrored on the micro level of student’s strategy and distinction work. To reconstruct this possible connection is the aim of our empirical inquiry. (For reasons of anonymity, references are omitted.)
Method
The sample consists of 95 biographical interviews with graduate students from the disciplines of management/business administration, medicine and musicology at full universities. We sampled specifically for different universities within and outside Germany, e.g. excellence status, rankings, prestige. The three disciplines represent different horizontal capital configuration in the context of the introduced theoretical framework of Bourdieusian capital theory, with management highly focused on economic capital and less on cultural capital, whereas in musicology it is the opposite. Medicine in Germany has the highest percentage of students from academic households among all study programmes (Middendorf et al., 2017) and prepares for an occupation with very high symbolic capital in Germany. Before the interview, interviewees were sampled by a short questionnaire that would indicate their social background, asking about their parents’ education, income and job. This was done to ensure an adequate number of interviewees from the higher, middle and lower milieus (Vester, 2003) for the purpose of comparative analysis with a clear focus on the upper milieus (UM) students. The milieus are horizontally differentiated class, but the “line of distinction” (Vester, 2015, p. 149) which separates the upper milieus from the middle milieus (middle class) can also be understand as a class distinction line. The analysis was realised with the help of the documentary method (Bohnsack, 2014; Nohl, 2010), which proves to be very prolific in explorative studies, as it not limits itself to the content of the interview, but also considers the implicit and habitual dimension of the interview and interviewee. To carve out different forms of educational strategies, potentially along class lines, diverge cases from all over the sample were compared over the issue of educational strategy and distinction, whether openly discussed or transported in the interview as a hidden form of habitus. Based on our initial assumption about social differentiation and distinction this was mainly conducted among vertical and horizontal lines of social stratification of the students (Bourdieu, 1984; Vester, 2003), but also allowed for new insights inductively coming from the material itself. Therefore, we paired the empirical openness of the documentary method with certain theoretical considerations.
Expected Outcomes
We show that upper-class students use different institutional levels of higher education to improve their educational strategies and their relative symbolic position in the field of higher education. This includes utilisation of recent stronger verticalization among universities on the macro level mirrored on the micro level of students' strategies. Another form of this strategy are internationalised study trajectories especially in higher education systems that are strongly stratified. Though this is depending on the discipline, which also goes beyond mere prestige on the institutional level of university. Options for combing subject or studying newly created distinguished programmes are as much important as the reputation and work of the department for students’ symbolic capital strategy. We also show that the most common pattern is the combination of spatial proximity with relative institutional symbolic power for regional upper-class students in demarcation to elite students.
References
Bohnsack, Ralf. 2014. “Documentary method.” In The SAGE handbook of qualitative data analysis, edited by Uwe Flick, 217–33. Los Angeles: Sage. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press . Deppe, U., Helsper, W., & Kreckel, R. (2015). Germany’s hesitant approach to elite education: Stratification processes in German secondary and higher education. In World Yearbook of Education 2015 (pp. 106-118). Routledge. Middendorf, Elke, Beate Apolinarski, Karsten Becker, Philipp Bornkessel, Tasso Brandt, Sonja Heißenberg, and Jonas Poskowsky. 2017. Die wirtschaftliche und soziale Lage der Studierenden in Deutschland 2016: 21. Sozialerhebung des Deutschen Studentenwerks. Hannover: Deutsches Zentrum für Hochschul-und Wissenschaftsforschung, Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung. Nohl, Arnd-Michael. 2010. “Narrative interview and documentary interpretation.” In Qualitative analysis and documentary method in international educational research, edited by Ralf Bohnsack, Nicolle Pfaff, and Wivian Weller, 195–217. Opladen: Barbara Budrich Vester, Michael. 2003. “Class and culture in Germany.” Sociologia, Problemas e Praticas 42 (2003) 42: 25–64. Vester, Michael. 2015. “Die Grundmuster der alltäglichen Lebensführung und der Alltagskultur der sozialen Milieus.” In Handbuch Freizeitsoziologie, edited by Renate Freericks and Dieter Brinkmann, 143–87. Wiesbaden: Springer.
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