Elite education and the making of a global wealth elite

Lecture by Karen Lillie, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.

Elite schooling is one wealth maintenance and reproduction strategy that well-resourced groups have historically pursued. For example, elite schools have been shown to reproduce wealth and status in the UK, France and the US, among other contexts. However, with the rise of international mobility as a defining feature of status and power, how education fits into the pipeline from the class of origin to a type of destination has become more complex. In this talk, then, I will discuss what we know about status reproduction on a national scale, the role of education in this process, and what happens when wealthy families look to position their children as part of a global elite, rather than a national one.

Bio

Karen Lillie is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. Her work critically investigates how elite educational institutions intersect with broader socioeconomic and political processes, in maintaining social inequalities.