The Heirs of Quebec. the Role of Private School and Cultural Capital in the Attainment of University Degrees Among Children with Elite Backgrounds
In this paper, we map Quebec’s elites and their strategies for sending their offspring to private school, and compare the university graduation of the offspring from different fractions of these elites. We observe how the elites differ according to the type of capital held (cultural or economic capital) as well as the type of secondary school attended (public or private). We show that the children of cultural elites are overrepresented in private schools and that the effect of private schooling on the chances of obtaining a university degree in Quebec is, itself, entwined with the effect of cultural composition, in other words, the fact that a high percentage of students in these high schools have parents who are university graduates. As a result, cultural capital explains the educational success of the elites in two ways at once: the direct effect of the family’s cultural capital and the indirect effect of the concentration of university-educated parents in schools.