Notes

she shares some of the powerful insights from this study. She shows how certain, highly fractious fractions of the US middle class have responded in a hyper-anxious and hyper-calculative, even desperate, manner to the insecurities associated with changing globalised labour markets – changes which, she points out, affect everyone, everywhere. College (university) admission, she argues, has become a site, par excellence, for intra-‘class warfare’ – a site where the socially advantaged struggle to preserve their individualised advantage as they see this becoming more fragile in the global context and less portable to their next generational kin. This work is in poignant conversation with the research being conducted in the ‘Elite Independent Schools in Globalising Circumstances’ project wherein we also witness similar processes of intensive angst-ridden, long-term capital accumulation work in anticipation of the sublime step to the next consecrated educational intuition – be it national or international. The university admissions market is clearly global and schools work immensely hard on their global positioning systems. Along with the USA, England is also a prime destination for socially and educationally ambitious students and parents from many parts of the world. And in England we see attempts by the current Tory government to curb the continued colonisation of elite universities by elite schools (Sutton Trust 2012) and to increase representation of state school students through the use of targets. In turn we witness a backlash from elite schools complaining, in the pages of the Telegraph for example, of ‘posh prejudice’, ‘jealousy and hostility’ and ‘discrimination’ (Henry 2013), with one headmaster even advocating a university boycott (Paton 2012). This is yet another instance of class work and warfare with the privileged portraying themselves as victims and mobilising class animosity against both the government (in which male graduates from elite schools are massively over represented) and state schools. Finally, in broad brushstrokes, Weis also points to some possible future directions for research on elite education to help us continue to improve our understandings of how education helps to secure power and privilege at the multiple intersections of class, gender, race and nation in the rapidly shifting global landscape, and, importantly, how such power and privileged might be challenged.