Strategies of social (re)production within international higher education: the case of Swiss hospitality management schools

Abstract

Globalisation has led to the transformation of the field of higher education, including an increase in international students’ mobility and new offers of internationalised educational curricula “at home”. This evolution provides new opportunities for both intentional and non-intentional strategies of educational internationalisation, which are a potentially important part of the social mobility and reproduction of the middle and upper classes. This article investigates the students of Swiss hospitality management schools (SHMSs)—institutions of higher education that are often privately run and characterised by a high degree of internationalisation. We explore the configurations of these students’ “cosmopolitan capital” (a combination of cultural, linguistic, social, and institutionalised assets acquired through transnational mobility or exposure to an international environment), and we ask how these configurations vary with regards to their social backgrounds, specifically concerning their proximity to the cultural versus the economic pole of the class structure. We carried out a multiple correspondence analysis of three dimensions of cosmopolitan capital of 381 students, used cluster analysis to identify five configurations of cosmopolitanism and then tested for the social characteristics of these students’ parents by using a multinomial regression model. Our results showed various strategies of the accumulation, conversion and legitimation of cosmopolitan capital, and they emphasised the role that this form of capital plays in the mobility and reproduction strategies of these students’ families.