Elite identity formation is shaped differently from one nation to another, but generally, the secondary and higher education system has an important role in its (re)production (Bourdieu, 1998; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). This study explores institutional habitus of elite schools through the choices, experiences, and future aspirations of Icelandic students. When the research is conducted, the students were about to finish their matriculation exams from schools known as elite schools in terms of academic performance.

The Nordic countries are often presented as model societies with high levels of happiness, commitments to democratic and meritocratic processes, and low levels of corruption and elitism. However, in recent years the social and cultural landscape of the educational field in the Nordic cities has been changing into a multicultural, class divergent and market-oriented society (Dovemark et al., 2018). Recent studies show clear correlation between student achievement and their backgrounds (Berglind Gísladóttir et al., 2019; Eiríksdóttir et al., 2022) as well as socio-geographical accumulation of economic and educational capital in certain neighbourhoods and schools (Magnúsdóttir et al., 2020). Despite the domination of neo-managerial policies in educational governance worldwide for the last 30 years the education system in Iceland bypassed most of the accountability policies but largely adopted the school autonomy policies. For the last decade, there have been no standardized tests at the end of the compulsory school level (Steiner-Khamsi et.al, forthcoming). The rationale for the importance of standardized tests was among other things to enhance meritocracy in selection process to elite secondary and higher education. In the last years, the hierarchy between school institutions at the upper-secondary level has become steeper and the route to success through the education system muddier. The combination of these factors has produced high importance to explore how elite institutions and identities are constructed and socially reproduced in this Nordic educational context.

One part of this research was conducted as a comparative study between Icelandic and Finnish education system using the same analytical framework (Magnúsdóttir & Kosunen, 2022) of Bourdieu’s conceptual framework (1998) to examine two elite educational institutions in each country from students’ perspective. This part of the analysis goes deeper into the institutional habitus of schools in the Icelandic system by reaching out to 10 schools in Iceland, thereof five of them selecting students of high achievement. Highly selective schools tend to produce what Bourdieu (1998: 102) described as ‘consecrated elite, that is, an elite that is not only distinct and separate, but also recognized by the other and by itself as worthy of being so’. In the analysis the concept of habitus is extended to capture the set of predispositions, taken-for-granted expectations and schemes of perception inside the schools (Reay et al., 2005; Tarabini et al., 2017), what has been referred to as institutional habitus. This is done through the voices of students as well as head teachers/principals and statistical background information derived from school administration. The aim is to explore the distinctive features of the schools and how the inherited and social capital of the students harmonize with their institutional habitus and play a part in their choices and experiences. What kind of habitus do they promote and discard through their academic and social practice? What kind of higher-education aspirations are framed in this context? How is the institutional habitus of these schools different and what do they have in common to elite schools in other countries? The main data collection was through semi-structured interviews conducted with 4-5 students from each school, altogether 48 interviews in 10 schools. The analysis was qualitative content analysis. Theory-informed analytical categories were applied on all discourse about prior school path, parents’ and siblings’ school paths and occupational careers, everyday life in school, social relationships in school, teachers’ expectations towards the students, homework, role of money in life, leisure activities, family time, political views and future aspirations. In addition, interviews were conducted with head teachers or principals having a long history of working in the school to better understand the history and institutional habitus of the school. The data on the non-selective schools was only used to triangulate or counterbalance the analysis of the selective ones.

The preliminary results show that most students did not experience much of a disjuncture between habitus and field in these elite schools. Educational choices were shaped and restricted by the inherited capital of their families, peers and friends and the young people did draw clear boundaries between school institutions. Family and fellow students’ values were ingrained into the habitus, and the awareness of privilege and class position was limited, as the schools were filled with other young people from higher social classes. The feeling of being the ‘right’ student for the school is an enactment of their habitus fitting well in the field of highly selective education. There were narratives of consecrative moments due to students’ visibility as members of elite institution, in terms of respect and popularity on the social media. The few that experienced being out of place were the ones coming from a more sociocultural distance in terms of social class or ethnicity. These schools were known to prepare students to be active in different fields of power, i.e. the economic, cultural or political field with very clear boundaries between them. They were serving different formations of middle-classness. Majority of the students in the selective schools were strongly directed towards status or canonical disciplines at the university level compared to students in the other schools. There is an obvious class (re)production mechanism driving their HE choices shaped by the institutional habitus of their upper-secondary schools and inherited capitals. The actual admission to the ‘right’ universities and disciplines requires certain capitals and habitus formation that is further nuanced in the selective upper-secondary schools.

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