Social justice or ‘human capital’ development through higher education: experiences of scholarship students in Lebanon

ABSTRACT

While literature documents how the employability agenda has become the new neoliberal common sense in universities much less attention has been given to the mechanisms of adaptation by students. Utilizing a four-year longitudinal case study of scholarship students at an elite university, this paper focuses on the process through which this ‘meritocratic’ program normalises neoliberal common sense in higher education. We put into question the principle of positive discrimination, considering the limited number of beneficiaries. Our findings illustrate that, instead of minimizing inequalities, this scholarship program contributes in strengthening the neoliberal ideology within the education system. We further demonstrate that students’ backgrounds influence their adaptation into the program and access to employment. In addition, we argue that urban-rural differences among others have more explanatory power than class differences in understanding the complex adaptation of students into the program in the Lebanese context.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• common sense
• human capital development
• Gramsci
• Bourdieu
• capital
• employability

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This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Maissam Nimer

Maissam Nimer is a postdoctoral researcher at the migration research center at Koç University and a 2018-2019 Mercator-IPC fellow at Sabancı University in İstanbul. She is a sociologist currently working on projects that deal with education and social inequalities as well as migration.  Nimer teaches a course ın sociology of education at Galatasaray University.

Çetin Çelik

Çetin Çelik is an assistant professor in the department of sociology at Koç University, Istanbul. He teaches on educational inequalities and immigrant migration. His fields of interests are mainly sociology of immigration and education, race and ethnicity.