Conference Program

Meritocracy and social mobility are grounded in a universal, unified and unifying understanding of high and low, up and down. Whereas a plethora of evidence, beginning with Bourdieu and Passeron (1979), debunked meritocratic ideologies, conceptualisations of social mobilities remain static: The goals of the upwardly mobile are presented as objective positions in the social space and accordingly accessible if enough relevant (forms of) capitals are accumulated.

Highly relevant at the time and place of its conception and publication (France at the dusk of the “golden age of capitalism”), this basic Bourdieusian understanding faces short-comings when applied to higher education (HE) in contemporary post-migrant societies after educational expansion. A way forward are Atkinson’s (2016) amendments of capitals as recognition, relationality, and historic rationalisation: factoring in the necessity of recognition by the ruling class; the dynamic of relationality and thus accelerated inflation of capitals; and the efficacy of domination through historic rationalisation, we must reconsider the function of HE for social reproduction and our understanding of social mobility.

Firstly, the socially mobile start from shaky grounds. Increased HE enrolment and educational mobility was – at least in OECD countries –accompanied by devaluations of hitherto valuable capitals, and increased educational attainment is driven and simultaneously drives credential inflation (Bourdieu 2008). Attainable goals however become fluid, since it is harder to constitute successful upward mobility. This is on the one hand driven by the reciprocal academisation of professions and professionalisation of academia (Stock et al. 2023). On the other hand, we can observe a moving of the goal posts as an act of domination and exclusion: without the right pedigree there is no access to elite positions (Friedman and Laurison 2019).

This can, secondly, be understood only by reconsidering the second part of capital theory: interchangeability. The theorem relies on a unified market where all participants are equally eligible to exchange economic for cultural capital and vice versa. However, like labour markets, markets for capital exchange are highly fragmented and for the disadvantaged, changing the marketplace comes with worse exchange rates or high fees. Since the disadvantaged cannot pay these fees, (intergenerational) social mobility becomes incomplete or fragmented. HE bears special responsibility in this regard, since it alters and accelerates this “alienating universalisation” inherent to education systems in capitalist states (Bourdieu 2020). Thus, (public) HE was never an engine for climbing the social ladder up to the elite echelons, but a tool for the (re)arrangement of intermediate and transclasse (Jaquet 2023) positions.

While this does not provide or bolster educational justice, we argue that there is a point in turning the system against itself. Contemporary elite (formation) is hardly dependent on reproduction through (public) HE institutions but recruits itself from political and economic networks, heavily inclined to the (far) right. Instead, the sector of the democratic public most dependent on HE nowadays has become civil society: from Chile to Germany, from Santiago to Riesa and Gießen, students, often in negligence of individual social mobility, have (once again) become the vanguards and vigilantes of social progress.