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Since the mid-twentieth century, higher education has been subject to spectacular growth. While the expansion of higher education is undoubtedly a general trend, its actual characteristics in terms of its specific conditions and driving forces vary by context. In this article, our aim is to develop such a socio-political historical narrative of Swedish higher education since 1945. We focus on how the Swedish case evolved in four salient aspects: (I) the transformations of the welfare state and the economy broadly defined; (II) the policies directly involved in redesigning the higher education system; (III) the scale, composition and structural relations between the parts of the higher education system; and (IV) the way different social groups (vis-à-vis gender and class) have used the system. We show that higher education policy has shifted its focus from massification and unification to marketisation and internationalisation. We notice that the conditions for the expansions differ substantially during the first three decades after 1945 compared to the 1990s in political, economic and demographic terms. While the system has opened up for increased participation overall, the way students are sorted into different institutions and fields of study by gender and class reveals a remarkably rigid social structure. Swedish higher education. Financing, Organisation, Enrolment, Outcomes, 1950-2020 (SHEFOE). Mapping Pathways in Higher Education

This article investigates the situation of Swedish upper secondary school students who have been subject to distance education during the COVID‐19 pandemic crisis. We understand the transition from onsite education to distance education as a recontextualization of pedagogical practice, our framing follows loosely concepts from Bernstein. Given that the field of upper secondary education is highly socially structured it is relevant to enquire into the social dimensions of distance education. For this purpose, we have analysed answers to an open‐ended question in a survey answered by 3,726 students, and related them to a cluster analysis distinguishing three main clusters of students: urban upper‐middle‐class, immigrant working‐class, and rural working‐class. The urban upper‐middle‐class students experienced problems decoding new requirements and were troubled by blurred boundaries between school and home. This group invests the most in schooling, and therefore expresses comparatively more anxiety for reaching anticipated achievements. Immigrant working‐class students were comparatively more discontented by a lack of school support and request clearer instructions. In this new educational situation, characterized by a weak framing, they have difficulties decoding the requirements. The rural working‐class students appear comparatively more disconnected from the school situation. Unlike urban upper‐middle‐class students, for whom the school invades the home and private sphere, the rural working‐class students seldom experienced that the school intruded their home;accordingly, their studies collapsed into sleep‐in‐mornings and a holiday feeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of European Journal of Education is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The notion of World Class University suggests that this category of universities operates at a global and not national level. The rankings that have made this notion recognised are global in their scope, ranking universities on a worldwide scale and feed an audience from north to south, east to west. The very idea of ranking universities on such a scale, it is argued here, must be understood in relation to the increasing internationalisation and marketisation of higher education and the creation of a global market for higher education. More precisely, this contribution links the rankings of world class universities to the global space of international student flows. This space has three distinctive poles, a Pacific pole (with the US as the main country of destination and Asian countries as the most important suppliers of students), a Central European one (European countries of origin and destination) and a French/Iberian one (France and Spain as countries of destination with former colonies in Latin America and Africa as countries of origin). The three poles correspond to three different logics of recruitment: a market logic, a proximity logic and a colonial logic. It is argued that the Pacific/Market pole is the dominating pole in the space due to the high concentration of resources of different sorts, including economic, political, educational, scientific and not least, linguistic assets. This dominance is further enhanced by the international ranking. US universities dominate these to a degree that World Class Universities has become synonymous with the American research university. However, the competition has sharpened. And national actors such as China and India are investing heavily to challenge the American dominance. Also France and Germany, who are the dominant players at the dominated poles in the space, have launched initiative to ameliorate their position. In addition, we also witness a growing critique of the global rankings. One of the stakes is the value of national systems of higher education and the very definition of higher education.

By international comparison, the Swedish educational system is more egalitarian than most. On upper secondary level there are hardly any equivalents to the grands lycees in France, or renowned public schools in England or liberal arts colleges in the US (Borjesson et al. 2016a; Borjesson and Broady 2016; Maxwell and Aggleton 2016; van Zanten 2016). No study fees are allowed, neither at private nor at municipality schools. All upper secondary programmes are 3 years long and until 2011, all of them had given general eligibility for higher studies. The admission to tertiary studies is centralised, not entrusted to individual universities, and what counts is school grades from upper secondary schools, alternatively scores obtained at the Swedish Scholastic Aptitude Test.

In the last three decades, Swedish education has undergone profound transformations, including a gradually increasing degree of privatization and marketization. These transformations offer an oppor ...

Swedish social sciences and humanities have expanded dramatically since 1945. The augmentation has been especially strong in the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1990s, coinciding with transitions from elite to mass to universal higher education. However, the expansion has been very uneven. The social sciences have surpassed the humanities in a number of aspects such as student enrolment, research financing and demand for their expert knowledge. Thus, a long-established order has been reversed. Our main conclusion is that the differentiated path the disciplines take is explained largely by their altered position in the field of higher education and changing demands from the labor market as well as the strengthened link between the expansion of the welfare state and the social sciences.

L’absence de filieres d’excellence elitaire distingue la Suede de presque tous les autres pays. Il n’y a, dans l’enseignement superieur, quasi aucune institution qui se distingue des autres par un recrutement d’etudiants d’origine sociale exceptionnellement elevee ou ayant des references scolaires brillantes. Aucun frais de scolarite n’est percu a quelque niveau que ce soit du systeme educatif, et des bourses d’etudes et des prets sont alloues a tous les etudiants suedois – ce qui creuserait une ligne de partage fondee sur l’economie. Pratiquement toutes les institutions d’enseignement superieur etant publiques, l’opposition entre prive et public est non pertinente. De plus, aux niveaux inferieurs du systeme suedois il n’existe que tres peu d’ecoles ou de voies institutionnelles ou l’on puisse percevoir facilement la preeminence des enfants des actuelles elites ou qui soient consacrees a la selection et a la formation des elites futures. Ainsi, pour comprendre le role de l’enseignement dans la reproduction et la production des elites suedoises, n’est-il pas possible de differencier un secteur specifique d’institutions elitaires. Il faut, au contraire, prendre en compte l’ensemble du systeme. Cet article propose d’analyser l’education de l’elite comme un sous-espace de l’espace de l’enseignement superieur suedois dans son entier, caracterise par une distribution inegale de differents types de capitaux. Cette perspective tient compte de la distinction entre elites et membres de la classe sociale superieure, aussi bien que des distinctions entre les differents types de capitaux – herites et acquis – qu’ils soient economiques, sociaux, culturels ou educatifs. Nous tenons pour centrale la distribution de ces capitaux entre hommes et femmes, puisque ces dernieres ont tendance a surclasser de plus en plus les premiers. Il est egalement notable que dans un pays peripherique comme la Suede les investissements educatifs dans des ressources transnationales soient d’une importance cruciale et croissante, tant pour les etudiants que pour les institutions. Une des principales conclusions est que le systeme educatif suedois est en cours de differenciation et n’est ainsi plus autant une singularite par rapport au reste du monde.

The purpose of this review is to investigate cross-cutting researchthemes and issues related to access and stratification in Nordichigher education (H.E.) (Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway andSweden). We synthesise how recent changes in H.E. policy, prac-tise, and appropriations have influenced educational opportunitiesalong social class, gender and age. In this review we highlightresults and conclusions shared by various recent Nordic studies.The emphasis is on the common trends and patterns related tosocial stratification in access., NordForsk

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

This chapter explains the overall expansion of the educational system has led to a growing overlap between the three definitions of elite education, as well as growing competition over the scarce resources that are assembled, refined and legitimated through elite schools and programmes. The Swedish educational system has undergone a parallel transition. The Sociology of Education and Culture (SEC) research unit at Uppsala University where we work has, however, been studying elite education in some depth for the past 25 years. It share some of the findings from our research, focusing in particular on the national and regional spaces within upper secondary education, and placing the analysis of these within the educational system as a whole. Correspondence analysis (CA) structure of the upper secondary education space is derived by using information on the social origin and gender of all Swedish pupils at this level within a particular timeframe.

This article presents a geometric data analysis (GDA) of the two “spaces of fictional universes” made up by the literary works of two cohorts of US prose fiction debut writers, 1940 and 1955. It is argued that the analysis reveals a common structure with significant variations that enable a comparison between two different states of a collective social imaginary, generated by 385 of the 560 authors included in the study. It is shown that the 1955 space is characterized by a greater contrast between agonistic and non-agonistic universes, and a firmer gendering of these oppositions. Other results include a confirmation of the generally accepted intuition that first novelists tend to reproduce features of their own social and geographical background in their works, but it is argued that different “site effects” enable a greater power to appropriate symbolically privileged spaces. The article concludes with a brief return to the individual authors, indicating the kind of research that the geometric data analysis makes possible.

In this article we present the results of an analysis of the publishing trajectories of the 1048 writers included in three debut cohorts (1940, 1955 and 1970). We define a publishing trajectory as the chronological series of published book-length works with basic bibliographical data for each work. A general comparison of the three cohort populations is presented, and the 1940 and 1955 cohort is compared in terms of gender and different trajectory profiles. We then provide a closer analysis of the 1955 cohort, which investigates the relation between literary success—seen in terms of either a long career span or a prolific career—and, first, publishers’ size and location; second, reception in the New York Times Book Review . In a final section we then outline a typology of author profiles for the 1955 cohort based on the trajectory variables.

Ballatore, Magali: Erasmus et la mobilite des jeunes europeens: entre mythes et realites, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010, 204 pp., €18, ISBN 978-2-13-058126-0 The Erasmus programme i...

Introduction: From Distinction to distinction studies Part 1: The genesis and career of Distinction 1. Elements for the history of a research: Constructing social space, from "anatomie du gout" to "Distinction" by Monique de Saint-Martin 2. The international career of "Distinction" 3. The intellectual reception of Bourdieu in Australian social sciences and humanities Part 2: The legacy of Distinction in France 4. From " petit-bourgeois " to " petits-moyens ", an invitation to explore short-range upward social mobility 5. Cultural intermediaries: reproduction strategies, resistance to social downgrading and self-fulfilment 6. Continuity and change: Cinematographic tastes in France 7. Culture at the individual level: Questioning the transferability of the habitus dispositions 8. Cultural distinction and material consumption Part 3: Variations on Distinction 9. The Swedish social space of 1990: Investigating its structure and history 10. Constructing social spaces: Scandinavian experiences 11. Cultural Distinctions in an Egalitarian Society 12. Bourdieu's space revisited: The social structuring of lifestyles in Flanders (Belgium) 13. A carnal critique of the judgment of taste: Corpulence, class bodies and symbolic violence 14. The Australian space of lifestyles in comparative perspective 15. The space of cultural practices in Mexico 16. Emerging forms of cultural capital

The map presented in this paper depicts relations between different programmes and branches at different upper secondary schools in the Stockholm area. Each educational alternative is characterised by the social recruitment of its pupils, that is by its shares of sons and daughters of civil engineers, lawyers, unskilled workers in the production, and so on. The social classi- fication comprises 34 such social groups. One main finding is that besides the well known social hierarchy significant "horizontal" distances separate the educational alternatives. In particular there is a major “horizontal” polarity separating schools, programmes and branches dominated by groups that posses more cultural than economic capital from those dominated by groups equipped with more economic than cultural capital. There is thus a divide between educational alternatives preferred by children of medical doctors or university teachers on the one hand and by owners and managers of private companies on the other hand. At a some- what lower societal level this polarity separates for example children of schoolteachers or librarians from children of white collar company employees. The growing diversity during the1990’s in the social recruitment to different kinds of upper secondary education did mainly imply sharpened “horizontal” divisions. As a consequence different types of elites gained better opportunities to find a trajectory through the educational system that suited their own offspring.