Understandings of Educational Privilege in Germany and Romania

This paper uses mixed methods to investigate how individuals from Germany and Romania perceive and conceptualise educational privilege. First, using population- level data from Round 9 of the European Social Survey, I construct a variable named ‘perceptions of privilege’ that measures the difference between the perceived fairness of respondents’ own chances to get the educational level sought, and the perceived fairness of educational opportunities for everyone else in their country. To investigate the reasons for the differences observed regarding the perceived (un)fairness of opportunities, this paper employs semi-structured interviews with elite students from both Germany and Romania. These students can provide an insider’s perspective into what constitutes educational privilege in these two countries. It was found that Romanian participants associate educational privilege with both cultural and financial resources, while German participants associate educational privilege mostly with cultural capital. The conceptualisations of educational privilege can be understood in the context of educational stratification in Romania and Germany. Thus, in line with findings by Matsuoka (2019) this article found that the strategies employed by parents who engage in concerted cultivation (Lareau, 2011) to gain educational advantages differed depending on the timing and requirements of high-stakes educational transitions in different educational systems. This article contributes to the limited research on whether and how highly educated people acknowledge and conceptualise their privilege (Friedman et al.,2021; Walgenbach and Reher, 2016; Power et al., 2016) by exploring privilege not as a contradiction to individual merit, but as the resources and opportunities to effectively channel effort and develop talents.