How is educational privilege experienced and justified beyond the confines of global north countries like the US, the UK, France and Australia where most elite education research takes place? Vildan Ozerturk Sofu writes about how elite school graduates make sense of their educational privilege in the Turkish national context, and how the justifications of merit differ for elite state and private school graduates.

The nature of privilege has long been debated in elite studies, particularly in elite education research. While academic research increasingly focuses on persistent inequalities in the educational field, the rhetoric and justifications of privilege are changing towards a more meritocratic tone. Several studies on elite schools, like that of Khan (2011) and Gibson (2019), reveal that achieved privilege resulting from hard work and personal endeavours is embraced proudly while unearned, ascribed privilege is looked down upon with contempt.

So how is privilege experienced and justified beyond the confines of global north countries like the US, the UK, France and Australia where most elite education research takes place? Conducting my doctoral research in Turkey, I was intrigued by how this focus on the justification of privilege played out in another context, which led me to ask how students in Turkish elite schools make sense of their educational privilege.

Turkey has a number of long established, highly prestigious schools, both state and private, dating back to the nineteenth century. In the Turkish educational system, all students graduating from middle school (at 8th grade) take the national high school entrance exam (‘LGS’) and gain admission to schools based on their test scores. According to the 2023 exam results, the top three schools with the highest base points of admission are all state schools. Admission to elite private schools is also highly competitive. Students are required to score in the 0.1 percentile in the LGS. However, the additional economic cost of attending these schools can sometimes overshadow the academic achievements of students.

I have conducted in-depth interviews with both elite state and private school graduates from different cohorts concerning their school experiences. Towards the end of each interview, I ask my participants whether they consider themselves ‘privileged’ or not.

All 32 participants responded positively to this question (although some expressed reservations about the term ‘privilege’). When asked to explain why they considered themselves privileged, their justifications, often emphasised ‘achievement’ over ‘ascription’. Moreover, the participants seemed to make a conscious effort to distance themselves from the perception of privilege as something given to them. This defensive attitude becomes evident in the response of a 50-year-old female participant who exclaimed: “Yes, we are privileged. But we weren’t given that privilege, we got it by paying dues!”

As I carried on conducting interviews, I noticed a distinction in the narratives of private and state school graduates: on the one hand, elite state school graduates talked more about their innate intellectual potential in having gained admission to an extremely competitive top school. For a 41-year-old graduate of an elite state school, his admission to a highly prestigious school felt ‘just natural’:

Honestly, it came just naturally. I mean, as I said, I was always top of my class…There were hardworking friends, of course, but it was already clear that my position was one step ahead. So, when I learned that I made it I had the feeling that everything was going as it should.

Elite private school graduates, on the other hand, stressed their ‘hard work’ and effort in their school experiences in a somewhat defensive tone as was the case with a 65-year-old female participant:

I mean, we weren’t all wealthy kids. We didn’t go to school in miniskirts with blow-dried hair, either. We were normal kids who had to deal with a very demanding curriculum.

This difference in rhetoric can be attributed to the social perceptions towards elite schools in Turkey. Expressing discomfort with the unfounded perception that their families’ wealth provides them with an easy education, a private school graduate felt the need to emphasise that they ‘don’t study on golden pillows as others think’.

In contrast, most participants from the two elite state schools talked about their cognitive abilities and ‘potential’, which helped them to succeed in the entrance exam and to cope with challenging classes at school. Unlike the emphasis on hard work in the narratives of the private school graduates, some participants from state schools reported studying ‘only enough to pass their classes’. This tendency to de-essentialise academic study despite the ‘university-level curriculum‘ of schools implies a belief in innate potential over the necessity of hard work. This self-confidence to succeed in anything ‘if they want’ becomes apparent in a statement of a male participant who graduated in the 70s:

From the second half of the 9th grade onwards, I could be called a lazy student…But I was very confident. Why? When I went to the Sorbonne, I thought to myself that I could do this, I graduated from Galatasaray. Most of my classmates thought like that, too.

As the majority of students in Turkish elite state schools don’t come from an elite but rather from a middle-class background it is easier for the graduates to justify their ‘well-deserved’ privilege over a language of ‘high potential’. The elite private school graduates, in difference, mainly adopt a rhetoric of ‘hard work’ in an attempt to refute the perception of ascribed privilege.

Although the latter rhetoric is consistent with the findings of elite education research in other contexts, the tendency of graduates from elite state schools to de-emphasise academic study while maintaining their high self-confidence in achievement is novel. Further research on elite state schools beyond the Global North is needed to provide fresh perspectives on assessing the capabilities of elite schools.

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of the Department of Sociology, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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