One of the specificities of French higher education is that there is no single higher education system but two compartmentalised and hierarchical higher education systems comprising (1) universities and (2) "grande école" higher education institutions. Competing for a place in the latter requires that students have succeeded in…

Could the standardisation of language narrow disparities in achievement in education amongst people of different social class, and within and across ethnicities and genders, and could this have implications for injustices and inequities in wider society? In analysing socio-economic diversity through the lens of its correlation with language, this…

This article is based on a multi-site study of teachers in elite private schools in Australia. Teachers' accounts from this study bring nuance to the reasons one might short-handedly expect they have in working for these exclusive institutions. It is not that everyday motivations don't matter, for example, the financial compensations, the…

'Narrowing the gap' and addressing low educational achievement of specific social class and ethnic groups has long been an expressed government concern. This paper considers the links between poverty, ethnicity and gender and school attainment and the interrelations of these factors using national data sets and other quantitative data. The…

This article aims to question the widely accepted idea that female university students in Spain have, in the past, tended to opt for degrees in the field of humanities. Based on an analysis of the official statistics that are currently available, the paper demonstrates that Spanish female university students showed a clear preference for…

This study draws on the concept of cultural capital to determine whether the cultural capital of students is related to their perceptions of classroom interactions, specifically teacher--student feedback practices. The analysis of new data in 'Feedback and Cultural Capital,' a Danish survey of feedback practices among 14-year-old and 15-year-old…

Literacy is considered to be a public good--one that benefits not only literate people, but also others in society through mechanisms of sharing and mediation. But to what extent do the benefits of literacy extend to socially distant groups? This paper applies the sociological concept of social distance to examine how social stratification impacts…

The article examines the question of access to higher education (HE) in the context of unprecedented and irreversible changes in the higher education sector in the current scenario. It is based on a comparative study that seeks to probe the question of access based on a secondary data analysis using the NSSO data regarding household consumer…

In this article, the author uses the academic/vocational split to reflect on some broader educational and cultural issues, for he thinks that the distinction as it is played out in school has much to teach people, whether or not they are directly involved with the issue of vocational education or, as it is now often called, career and technical…

Opportunities for higher education in China have grown continually since the reestablishment of the college entrance examination system in 1978, with a percentage of overall enrollment that soared from 1.56 percent in 1978 to 15 percent in 2002, showing that China had already entered the era of mass higher education. However, does the expansion of…