Intergenerational Reproduction of Distinctive Cultural Capital: A Study of University Education Obtained Abroad and at Home

Cultural and social reproduction strategies are no longer limited to nation states but now operate across borders. A number of scholars have noted that investments in foreign elite education have become increasingly attractive (e.g., Wagner 2007), but supporting evidence is limited due to a lack of suitable data. An increasing number of students are enrolling in and completing university programmes, including in Denmark; however access is characterised by social selection, which particularly implies horizontal differentiation (Munk and Thomsen 2018). This social selection could affect the willingness to invest in education abroad. I suggest that the acquisition of this type of distinctive cultural capital abroad is viewed as an intergenerational reproduction strategy that supplements the portfolio of other strategies. Thus, I investigate whether migrants who graduate from elite universities abroad constitute a socially selected group. Prior research provides ample evidence of the effect of family background on the likelihood of obtaining higher education in domestic universities, and previous studies have demonstrated that family background is still a vital condition in educational attainment, especially with regard to elite education. However, whether social origin also increases the probability of obtaining higher education abroad remains unresolved. Therefore, I examine how family background affects the likelihood of obtaining a degree from an elite or non-elite university abroad compared to obtaining a university education at home, with no university as the reference category. This design is unique in the literature on international students because this line of research has lacked a comparison group in the home country to assess whether there is an effect that differs from social selection in domestic universities. The tool that currently defines elite and non-elite universities is university ranking lists, inspired by the study published by Wendy Espeland and Michael Sauder in the American Journal of Sociology in 2007. The merging of survey and register data has made it possible to compare migrants with non-migrants with regard to a set of common covariates. The combination of high-quality register data containing information on parental background and a weighted sample of emigrants makes it feasible to answer these questions. I restrict the sample to Danes who emigrated in the period between 1987 and 2002 and who had lived abroad for at least 5 years. In this chapter, I find that having highly privileged parents—often with abundant cultural capital and transnational orientations—increases the likelihood of obtaining university education at home and abroad.