ABSTRACT
Sweden’s education system has undergone major changes over the past few decades and is today legally, materially, socially and economically opened up to active private-sector participation in the delivery of education, even on a for-profit basis, with this rendering the Swedish government and education authorities into intermediaries in the process of converting common tax money into private capital. There are a number of contradictions that could be addressed in relation to this development. However, the key question we are addressing in this chapter concerns only one of them: the provision of upper secondary education programmes that private companies provide. The chapter is based partly on ethnographic data and earlier publications and partly on statistical data from the Swedish National Agency for Education (SNAE). It shows that the so-called market forces are poor arbiters of education access and justice and that market players show little interest in running low-status programmes. Instead private education providers positively select both the programmes they give and the students they given them to. Higher education preparatory programmes are highly predominant, as is the positive selection of students who come from homes and districts that are recognizably well endowed with cultural and economic capital.
