Bourdieu’s conceptual tools, particularly cultural capital, social capital, field and habitus, have been used in higher education participation literature to explain how certain academic and social circumstances render students educationally (dis)advantaged; the setting for this research tending to be the ‘Global North’ (e.g. Reay, David and Ball 2005, Brooks 2003, Dika and Singh 2002, Thomas 2002). This paper locates Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus in a Croatian higher education setting and affirms its contemporary usefulness for explaining the educational choices and experiences of Croatian first year undergraduate students of different socio-economic backgrounds.

The first part of the paper locates the discussed study in a broader Croatian HE framework by drawing on selected Eurostudent (2011) data for Croatia in order to portray the social profile of the Croatian student body and highlight the under-representation of particular socio-economic groups of students in Croatian HE. This brief introduction drawing on first such available nationally representative data for Croatia especially emphasizes the difference in the social profile of students at professional as opposed to academic study courses at tertiary level. The second part of the paper is theoretical. It takes as its focus Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural, social and economic capital, since their forms were identified as significant contributors to educational (dis)advantage in the research study the paper primarily draws on. This part lays out Bourdieu’s concretization of the concepts (1986, 1977) and provides examples of how they have been spelled out in educational research (e.g. DiMaggio 1982, Ganzeboom, De Graaf and Robert 1990, Sullivan 2001), with special focus on more recent uses of the concepts which include the ways in which institutional practices recognize their different aspects (e.g. Reay et al. 2005, Reay 2004, Lareau and Weininger 2003). Building on from that, the paper takes an empirical look at how instances of cultural, social and economic capital (non)possession have been identified as shaping educational (dis)advantage for a sample of Croatian higher education students. These instances are classified and their repercussions discussed in terms of their form and institutional (mis)recognition. The theoretical premises of the concepts as laid out in the second part are interacted with throughout this data lead section.

The overall aim of the paper is to discuss the educational implications of cultural, social and economic capital (non)possession in the researched Croatian educational context, as well as the theoretical premises of the analytical tools worked with. In addition, the paper aims to contribute to a more complex understanding of the so-called 'social dimension' of the European-wide Bologna process.

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