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Drawing on empirical data regarding educational strategies among internationally mobile families in the Stockholm-Uppsala region, this study questions the notion of a global middle class. First, a quantitative analysis shows that immigrating middle class professionals and their children are few, having marginal impact on the demand for international education. Furthermore, they far from constitute a homogeneous class, instead comprising of fractions opting for different types of schools. A second, qualitative study on capital conversion among mobile families illustrates that even well-educated international movers face serious challenges converting their existing knowledge, skills and contacts into well-informed social, professional and educational strategies in their new context. This suggests the limitations of concepts such as international capital. It is argued that the GMC concept overshadows the fact that social groups within the middle classes have varying degrees of international mobility that constitutes just one dimension of what separates them from each other.

The idea of a strong tie between culture and education, advocated by Bourdieu and his colleagues from the 1960s, is in this article explored in detail by investigating cultural capital in both its embodied state, expressed in tastes and cultural practices among students in the elite subfield of Swedish higher education, and its institutionalised state, through an analysis of the same students’ enrolment patterns. By applying Specific MCA to a questionnaire answered by 1152 students at 20 socially and scholarly selective programmes we identify three main dimensions in the space of lifestyles. The first dimension separates advanced and legitimate cultural practices and tastes from mainstream ones. In a second dimension, elaborate and often costly body-oriented practices in training or clothing are distinguished from a more ascetic lifestyle. The third dimension opposes a pole of establishment from a pole of non-establishment. The study programmes are well dispersed in the space of lifestyles, which suggests a close relation between embodied and institutionalised states of cultural capital. We finally argue that the pursuit of field-specific capital best explains this dispersion: the future trajectories into specific regions of the field of power tend to correspond to distinct lifestyles of various categories of elite students. The Struggle for Students. The Swedish Field of Higher Education and the Recruitment Strategies of the Institutions