The homology between the private and the public fields in higher education

Abstract

External privatisation of public education has emerged in Finland in the admission to higher education. A field analysis of thematic interviews (N = 22) with powerful actors in the private educational market and middle-class young people applying for places at universities in the highly competitive disciplines of medicine and law was conducted. The research task was to examine the discourses that construct the limits of the public and private fields, and the kind of homology that emerges. Four discourses were identified: support, business, social responsibility, and personal responsibility. The private field distinguished itself from the public fields through the discourse of business and attached itself to it through the discourse of support. The dominance of the symbolic power of transformed economic capital in the private field mobilised in the public field was misrecognised during the admission process as ‘motivation’. The homology between the two fields was strong yet hidden.

Keywords:

• Homology
• field
• higher education
• privatisation
• admission
• habitus

Introduction

The societal task of education is to select students and to qualify those who are selected (Bourdieu and Passeron 1964). The field of higher education functions as a sorting machine, which selects students in line with implicit social classifications and reproduces their positions as academic classifications that closely resemble the original social structure (Bourdieu 1996). The selection mechanisms and mediators of university admission therefore play a crucial role in influencing the premises of the struggle over the (re)production of dominant and subordinate positions in tertiary education. The universities contribute to the misrecognition and the naturalisation of social structures, in which the academic language is the main dividing vehicle (Bourdieu 1996). On the conceptual level, attention in previous research has been directed to how the field of higher education is constructed, and to which other fields are relevant in the admission process (e.g. Naidoo 2004; Marginson 2008; Bathmaker 2015), but there is a need for more in-depth analysis of the relationship between the public and the private spheres. The Finnish public field of higher education is seemingly autonomous as a field. Simultaneously, its strict selection practices and thereby closure effects (Hilgers and Mangez 2015) are strongly influenced by the private educational sector particularly through a private fee-based preparatory course market (Kosunen 2018), which provides the candidates with private tutoring for the entrance examinations of universities.

Growth in the use of private-sector services in public education has been reported lately throughout Europe (Cone and Brøgger 2020). Forms of privatisation in the field of higher education range from research funding to admission certificates and preparing candidates for entrance examinations set by various institutions, all of which shape the limits and the logic of action within the social space of higher education. The discussion about exogenous and endogenous privatisation (Ball and Youdell 2008) has been ongoing for more than a decade now. Nevertheless, it still offers a fruitful framework within which to explore changes in the field of public education attributable to the influence of private forces in terms of importing new private actors into the market (exogenous privatisation) or changing the ways in which education as a good is discussed (endogenous privatisation). Such a framework positions applicants as educational consumers (Naidoo and Jamieson 2005; Kosunen and Haltia 2018). As Naidoo (2004) points out, the relative autonomy of the fields varies in time and space (see Bourdieu 1987). It is therefore necessary to investigate the limits and relations of and between the fields in a certain national context at a certain time to enhance understanding of how social inequalities are reproduced in education.

Bourdieu refers to the task of empirical research as being to identify the limits of the field(s) in question, and the legitimate habitus and forms of capital that are active and efficient within them; in other words, how ‘the game’ is played (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). The particular focus here is on the homology of public and private education in admission to universities: the aim is to explore how both economic and cultural capital in their different forms function as mobilisable, transformable, and transmittable capital in the process. Homology refers to ‘resemblance within a difference’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 106), in other words the ‘morphological resemblance between the structures of different fields’ that exists due to the hidden logics of social action (Wang 2016, 349). Homologies (Bourdieu 1993) explain how different cultural fields are organised in a hierarchical manner. Fields are substantively homologous, if positions can be mapped across fields ‘based on transposable characteristics of the position’ (Levi Martin and Gregg 2015, 49). The key is the association between habitus and field position, and how the varieties of habitus have different reactions to the field effect (Levi Martin and Gregg 2015). The academic positions are hierarchised by their establishment, discipline, and tracks within them (Bourdieu 1988, 1996). The ways in which various types of capital gain symbolic power and become mobilisable depend upon the organisation and the limits of the field. The field consists of ‘a set of objective, historical relations between positions anchored in certain forms of power (or capital)’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 16) and it is the structure through which different actors become positioned in the social structure (Bourdieu and Saint Martin 1987). Bourdieu (1984, 126) states that a horizontal movement between fields in a social space requires an ability to transform one form of capital into another, and further to transmit it from one field to the next. In case the homology remains hidden, the ‘collocation of agents into hierarchized academic positions constitutes in turn one of the primary mechanisms of the transformation of inherited capital into academic capital’ (Bourdieu 1996, 37). These transformations within and between the public and private fields of higher education are at the core of this article.

The analysis in this article is drawn on the homology between the public and the private fields of higher education. I analyse the discourses through which the process of admission to universities was constructed in interviews with those involved in preparatory courses: customers and preparatory course market actors (N = 22). This dual angle is intended to capture both the provision and the demand, which together as related parts constitute the market for private supplementary tutoring (see Kosunen et al. 2022) and illuminate the relations of the private and public fields. I explore how economic capital becomes transformed into cultural capital, misrecognised and thereby naturalised in the process of admission in public, tuition-fee-free, and reputably egalitarian Finnish higher education.

Public and private higher education in Finland

Contrary to what has been reported in other contexts (e.g. Bathmaker 2015), the Finnish field of public¹ universities is relatively non-hierarchical. In terms of stratification (see Isopahkala-Bouret 2018; Heiskala, Erola, and Kilpi-Jakonen 2021), however, socially distinctive lines flow between the academic universities and universities of applied sciences in particular. Research shows that those from more affluent backgrounds end up in universities despite inferior school performance, whereas those with better performance but from more disadvantaged backgrounds, if anything, choose and become accepted in universities of applied sciences (Heiskala, Erola, and Kilpi-Jakonen 2021). As elsewhere, the student population in universities is skewed, with an overrepresentation of young people from affluent, urban backgrounds (Nori 2011). The clearest class-based distinctions in Finnish universities seem to flow between disciplines within universities, in particular medicine and law (Kosunen et al. 2021), which generally have a special role in the academic hierarchies (Bourdieu 1988). Hence, the fairness of the constructed meritocracy needs to be questioned, and the social mechanisms mediating the admission process should be investigated more thoroughly (see Liu 2011).

All students in Finland who have completed secondary education are officially eligible to apply for tertiary education in the public field. The selection of students for higher education is based mainly on the results of the matriculation examination, or entrance examinations. Entrance examinations are organised by the respective universities and are therefore institution and discipline-centred. There are no widening-participation quotas in Finnish higher education, even if routes from vocational secondary education to universities have been developed (see Haltia, Isopahkala-Bouret, and Jauhiainen 2022). Competition over study positions is harsh, especially in high-status disciplines. In 2019, for example, only 4.2% of all applicants for medicine were admitted, although there were institutional differences: the University of Tampere, with the most competitive admission process, admitted only 3.2% of candidates (Vipunen 2020). As a field, Finnish public higher education declares to have relative autonomy, owning its own selection procedures and admission practices resulting in closure effects (see Hilgers and Mangez 2015).

The limits of ‘public’ and ‘private’ as fields of higher education in Finland are debatable. The ‘private’ in this study includes primarily the provision side of education, that is, the private institutions providing formal and informal post-secondary education, excluding, for example, the families from the core analysis of the limits of the field and treating them as actors (together with the [young] applicants) in the field. Higher education in Finland has traditionally been tuition-fee free. Institutes of higher education are generally not allowed to charge tuition fees (except to students coming from outside European Union/European Economic Area countries), hence the usage of private economic capital in this sense is not very common. Moreover, on the national level the field is strongly regulated in the form of guidance and finance from the Ministry of Education and Culture, even if the institutions are officially autonomous. Unlike in many other contexts (see, e.g., the division between universities and grandes écoles and their preparatory classes in France in Bourdieu [1996]), the symbolic hierarchy of prestige does not run between public and private universities² in Finland, but rather between public universities and their disciplines, as the market for private universities is considered minimal. Their key social procedure of constructing the distinctive social status is the harsh selection process (see Robbins 2004) within the public field.

The privatisation of public education (Ball and Youdell 2008) is reportedly emerging in Finland in the admission to higher education as preparatory courses (see Kosunen 2018; Kosunen, Haltia, and Jokila 2015) aimed at coaching students for university entrance examinations. Those are the largest and thus far most visible group of private actors in the field of higher education. The preparatory courses are provided by private for-profit companies and organisations and remain outside the official education system: they cannot provide study credits or diplomas. Private, supplementary, fee-based tutoring is somewhat of an anomaly in the Finnish field of education, which is universally based on the premise of tuition-fee-free education at all levels. Their objective is to prepare the candidates for the entrance examinations of universities particularly in certain competitive majors, such as law or medicine. The applicants describe that these courses provide structure for reading and for example answering technique (Kosunen et al. 2018). The course providers do not need any official accreditations for teaching these courses, despite some of them being organised by alumni of the discipline (Kosunen and Haltia 2018). For example, Helsinki University staff are not allowed to participate in any activities regarding preparatory courses (University of Helsinki 2019).

The courses are provided across the country, mainly in university cities (Jokila, Haltia, and Kosunen 2019). They may last for up to nine months and cost up to €7700 (Kosunen et al. 2022). Nevertheless, they cannot guarantee success in the examination or admission to the university in question. Several points of economic, social class-based and geographical inequalities have been reported regarding this growing market (Kosunen et al. 2021; Jokila, Haltia, and Kosunen 2021), including notions of creating more trump cards for those from more affluent backgrounds rather than compensating significantly for the existing bias by transmitting such cultural capital that would benefit applicants from more disadvantaged backgrounds (Kosunen et al. 2021). The emergence and growth of private supplementary tutoring as a field in Finnish university admission is constructed in the discourse as the endogenous privatisation of public education (see Kosunen and Haltia 2018). On offer are different educational products from private tutoring in secondary education, preparation for entrance examinations, and legal help in lodging complaints (Kosunen et al. 2022). The recent admission reform aimed explicitly at diminishing the role of preparatory course market in the admission by emphasising the matriculation examination results in the selection (MinEdu 2016). As an outcome in the most competitive majors, the number of preparatory courses remained relatively the same (nationally about 100 courses in medicine, 40 in law) during the reform, the prices increased (e.g. in medicine the median course price in 2014 was €1350, and in 2020 was €2040) and an additional 200 courses of private tutoring for matriculation examinations during secondary education emerged in the market (Kosunen et al. 2022). The role of money spent in tuition-fee-based tutoring for entering tuition-fee-free higher education is thereby relevant in a system where no tuition fees or other expenses are considered as a part of university admission or education in general.

Materials and methods

The interviewees (N = 22) referred to in this article were powerful actors in the market for preparatory courses (PC; n = 5) and students applying for places in higher education institutions in the status disciplines of medicine and law (n = 17, names in the excerpts starting with L indicating law and M indicating medicine). All of the interviews were one on one, except for one that was conducted with two applicants. The private-sector actors were comprehensively dominant in the field in terms of the scale of their business and geographical reachability, and as individuals they had a central role in their organisations that encompassed planning, marketing, prizing, and staff recruitment (see Kosunen 2018). The interviews were conducted between 2015 and 2017, and they lasted between 40 and 90 minutes. The themes included preparatory courses as education, course participants, course content, the recruitment of teaching personnel, and the relationship between the companies concerned and the relevant universities.

The rest of the interviews were conducted with applicants (n = 17) who had taken a preparatory course in law (n = 5) or medicine (n = 12). Eleven of them were female and six were male; they ranged in age between 19 and 35 years; and 16 of them had a secondary degree from academic upper-secondary education and one from vocational secondary education. The preparatory courses in question were organised by two companies in Helsinki, and the participants applied to universities around Finland. Seven of them covered the costs of the course themselves, and 10 with the support of parents or relatives. All of the interviewees were classified as belonging to fractions of the middle class based on parental educational and professional background and had Finnish as their first language. Income was not discussed.

I scrutinised the interview data in a Bourdieusian theoretical framework (Bourdieu 1988, 1996; Bourdieu and Passeron 1964) by applying the field analysis in the reading of the material as discursive and social praxis, which has been a relatively rare method applied in policy sociology of education (see Lingard, Rawolle, and Taylor 2005). The research task, following Bourdieu’s definition of field studies (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), was to define the following:

1. the discourses through which the limits of the public and private fields of higher education were constructed and limited in the interviews; and

2. the homology between these two fields that was discursively constructed, in other words how different forms of capital were mobilised, transformed, and transmitted between fields, and what kind of symbolic power they gained in positioning the actors in and between them (see Bourdieu 1988).

In the first round of analysis I applied the analytical tools to all of the content that concerned the admission and the meaning of the preparatory courses: customers, usefulness, and goals, competition in public education, and its relationship with the public field of university education. At a later stage I broke it down into specific discourses that constructed the limits of the fields and their homology through a Bourdieusian analytical framework with a particular focus on field, habitus, and homology.

Results

I defined four discourses from the interview talk dealing with the admission process in both the public and the private fields of education, namely discourses of support, business, social responsibility, and personal responsibility. In the following I discuss their mutual relations and aim to describe the limits which they construct (and deconstruct) to the public and private fields of education.

Uncertainty and distinction in the competition in the public field: the discourse of support in the private field

In the interviews the preparatory courses were described as a form of support for applicants who, for some reason, thought they were not able to prepare adequately for the entrance examinations on their own. This form of support required economic resources, however. Support was discussed in a very general manner, referring to structures and routines connected with reading for the examination as well as providing peer support. What was largely left unspoken concerned concrete issues that would make someone who did their own preparation for the examination somehow ineligible. The need for support was rather constructed as something that was relevant to all applicants, irrespective of their prior performance, especially in the discourse of the course providers.

The discourse of support conveyed what could be expected of the course and what the providers could promise their customers. The idea of dealing with uncertainty and reducing it was constantly referred to. However, it was also repeatedly said that the course did not guarantee entry, that it was only a form of support (a ‘help tool’ [PC4]). Nor was it explicitly constructed as a necessity by the course providers, even if the customers saw it as such:

Let’s say the preparatory course is not a necessity in getting the study place, but it goes there alongside. Of course, you have different sorts of people, some are able to read for themselves and are very independent and by those means go through the process, but then there is the other half who need the support as well. And then we are there for them. (PC2)

A typical customer was constructed as a young person in their last year of secondary education, whose parents paid the course fee. The discourse of support was constructed through the urgent experienced need to take such a course when applying to study in these competitive disciplines. This was not solely a personal need for support, but rather as relational deficit in comparison with other (imagined) candidates:

It has been suggested, kind of, that law school, business school and med school are places, where you almost have to take a prep course to get in, that it’s a bit … I don’t know if it is just marketing or what [laughs]. (Leila, age 20 years, lower middle class, applying for the second time, on a prep course for the second time)

If you want to get into med school or become a lawyer, you have to take a prep course. (Maria, age 35 years, upper middle class, applying for the first time, on a prep course for the first time)

Thereby, the field of private education managed to make itself seem like an unavoidable pit stop from public secondary to public tertiary education: the skills gained while attending the preparatory courses were described as valuable and legitimate in public higher education. Martin had excellent grades in natural sciences at general upper secondary school. However, his earlier academic success did not diminish his uncertainty about admission:

I’m not the golden star among others, who shines so bright that he will go past everyone else, I most likely belong to those [who need a course] because I don’t usually work hard enough to be the one [the star]. (Martin, age 21 years, lower middle class, applying for the second time, on a prep course for the first time)

As shown here, in this discourse everyone would be in need of private supplementary tutoring, which is considered ‘somehow compulsory’ even for those with the most highly recognised assets. The discourse of support functioned as a powerful tool for finding customers as well as maintaining the line of thought indicating that one needs support. The applicants not attending a course were perceived as the best applicants with inhumane skills, who did not need a course and would still be admitted, or as less ‘motivated’ and less ‘serious’ about getting in than those doing a course. Neither of these positions is an easy option in a time of high uncertainty, as the threat of becoming an ‘impossible learner’ (Youdell 2006; or just a ‘loser’, as the candidates said) is spread to all candidates in this discourse. This was linked to a middle-class habitus of the interviewees, who had a presumption of needed skills in the entrance examination, suspicion of lacking them, and economic means of trying to compensate for them:

Well in fact I thought that yes, for me it is somehow compulsory [to take a prep course]. Especially, as I started from scratch, so I thought that I would get a lot from the course in comparison to some, who have already read a lot in advance and gone through all [relevant] courses in high school. (Mona, age 22 years, lower middle class, applying for the second time, on a prep course for the second time)

The private field of education positioned itself in the discourse of support as a saviour of those who do not expect to succeed in gaining admission in the public field on their own. In this description it shows itself as supporting ‘the weaker’ ones in the competition in the public field, thereby positioning itself as a cooperative field next to it. In a discourse, the private field would support some kind of widening-participation policy in expanding the scope of gaining entrance to public universities in Finland, even if the evidence shows that many course participants admitted in universities come from affluent backgrounds (Kosunen et al. 2021). The private field basically interferes with the field autonomy of the public field when providing remedial teaching, which the public field is described as unable to provide (see Holloway and Kirby 2020). Simultaneously, the public field explicitly distinguishes itself from the private field, emphasising its autonomy by imposing regulations that bar employees from engaging in any private tutoring business (see Kosunen 2018).

The discourse of business and educational consumerism: the autonomy of the private field

The providers’ preparatory courses were scaling the business by segmenting customers, targeting the marketing (price, length, and study methods), and developing various products (intensive and distance courses, even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic):

Now during the past few years, the competition for those students and applicants who have not taken […] preparatory courses before because, for example, they cost a lot of money, so we now have some targeted courses, slightly cheaper, there may be more now. We have tried to attract those who have previously applied on the basis of their own knowledge and reading. Expanded, so to say, […] tried to scale up the potential users. (PC5)

Buying a preparatory course was discursively constructed as an economic investment, which would pay off later in working life. This positioned the customers as educational consumers:

Well, it is disciplined [preparation for the entrance examination] […] I usually say that starting at university, the hardest part is the entrance examination, and I remember that even from my day. After that everything until the Master’s thesis seems easy. But of course it depends on what you want, that you sacrifice, well sacrifice and sacrifice, but work hard for nine months to get the study position you want. After that you may have 40 years, 30 years ahead of you, so it pays back there then. (PC2)

The preparatory course providers were using the consumerist discourse as legitimising the use of private economic capital presumably (as they claimed the courses having an influence in the meritocratic examination system) influencing the rank order of all candidates: this was an investment by their customers. Some of the applicants did not see investing money as a big issue, but rather a profitable investment in the long run. Educational consumerism was constructed when the transformation from economic to cultural capital emerged:

It might get expensive, but when I become a doctor, it’s OK, because in the future I will make money. So the money comes back to me, it does not disappear from me. It’s not a small amount, but this course gives me a lot of opportunities and I progress quickly with it … go earlier to university, earlier out of school and earlier to working life. (Maria, age 35 years, upper middle class, applying for the first time, on a prep course for the first time)

Buying a preparatory course was constructed as a natural way of consuming educational goods, transforming economic into cultural capital in the private field, and transmitting the embodied cultural capital from the private to the public field. There, it could later be legitimised into institutionalised cultural capital in the form of degrees from universities and later transformed back into economic capital in the labour market. Buying courses was compared by the course organisers as well as their customers with many other forms of consumption such as buying cars, holidays, handbags, fake lashes, the services of a personal trainer, and alcohol. The quality of the courses was largely constructed in discussions about the success of the applicants in the admission process, the quality of the teaching, the extensive experience of private tutoring in some of the companies, and the staff-recruitment criteria. However, even when requested, no numbers were given comparing the applicants taking their courses and those who were admitted. The reputation of the different providers was a core issue, and it was strongly protected even in the research interviews. From the applicants’ side there was a strong belief that the course organisers knew more about the entrance examinations than they did, hence taking the course was a rational step.

Within this discourse, actors in the private sector took a step away from the field of public education and performed the autonomy of the private field of education lacking all the regulations the public one dealt with. ‘This is business’, as the interviewees stated, implicitly presenting profit-making in private education as self-evident. This was also a way of legitimising the possible reproduction of inequalities that is attached to private supplementary tutoring: it is education as a private rather than a public good, and the applicants are positioned as customers. Organisers of the preparatory courses benefitted financially from being able to collect tuition fees, but they could not award credits or diplomas. The latter had been a central issue, which the public universities held on to when trying to socially construct their field autonomy (Bourdieu 1987; see Kosunen 2018; Hilgers and Mangez 2015).

The myth of meritocracy: conflict of social and personal responsibility in legitimising the structure and closure of the public field

The discourse of social responsibility indicated a strong sense of public responsibility in providing good education to all regardless of their social background: it goes without saying in the Finnish context that it conflicted with the tuition-fee basis of preparatory courses. This discourse was an inevitable part of the discussion on tuition fees in the private field:

PC1:I think, because [the prep courses] un-equalises.

S.K.:In what way?

PC1:Not everyone has the money to go on a preparatory course.

S.K.:Yeah, that that is the main–?

PC1:I think it is [the main reason why the courses are criticised]. Because it is chargeable, then it thereby un-equalises, as some people can’t afford it. As in Finland it is thought that studying is free of charge, therefore I think it comes from there.

The private actors needed to take a stance to the presumably unequalising role of the transformation of economic to cultural capital gained at a preparatory course and the presumed homology of its value later in the public field. The economic capital still seemed to be taboo in the local context. However, its role in the reputably ‘meritocratic’ system raised some thoughts:

They say that it is tuition-fee-free to study in Finland and so on, but I’m starting to feel that especially in those, where it’s hard to get in anyhow, like law school and med school, there I start feeling the difference. So if you don’t take a preparatory course, do you end up lacking a lot of trivia about the exam and all, if you don’t take the course. And if that’s the reason [for not being admitted], that would not be equitable, that everyone could get in if they just want to, as not everyone can afford the course. (Mona, age 22 years, lower middle class, applying for the second time, on a prep course for the second time)

Mona discusses the economic obstacles that according to the general discussion in Finland should be non-existent in the admission to higher education, as it is impossible to access the field of higher education just by paying tuition fees to the (non-existing) private universities. However, this excerpt materialises the logic of the hidden homology (Bourdieu 1996): the money through different transformations is supposedly playing a role according to the interviews, and as this role is expected to have an influence in the competition, it may (or the lack of it) turn out to be an obstacle in the whole application process:

Well the preparatory course is probably the biggest [financial] step, for all, and when you get admitted then the [student support] probably covers the studies pretty much, but well, the preparatory course [fee] is the biggest step and therefore many might not apply at all, because they think that it [the prep course] is needed. (Lea, age 20 years, lower middle class, applying for the second time, on a prep course for the second time)

Lea exemplifies a possible case of self-exclusion from public education based on a lack of economic capital. As a reaction to accusations of increasing inequality, the course providers came up with various scholarships (see Kosunen and Haltia 2018), which would enable some individual applicants to take their courses despite their lacking economic resources. This is an interesting contrast to university scholarships (which do not exist in the Finnish context) and widening-participation policies in other contexts, and it seems further to strengthen the discursive function of these courses as a necessity and suitable for all applicants. The preparatory course providers are through this seen also as socially sustainable actors.

However, even if echoes of the old Nordic one-school-for-all ideology could be heard, there was a simultaneous discourse targeting personal responsibility and consumerism: private education was considered an investment, and thereby success in the entrance examination was the embodiment of personal responsibility and an act of motivation. Within the discourse of personal responsibility, attending the private field was constructed as indicating strong commitment, and the money used for the courses as a bond showing that the person was ‘truly motivated’ in, paradoxically, entering the public field of higher education. The applicants background was faded out in the talk. Social class, gender, and ethnicity are all strongly intertwined in educational choices (see Crozier et al. 2008), but they completely disappeared in the motivation talk:

Of course, there are annual differences amongst the course participants, if they have motivation. If they don’t have motivation it does not matter who teaches them, how and by which methods. If you don’t have motivation, then you may not get a study place. (PC1)

This was also interpreted as a general practice amongst our middle-class young people, given the discursive power of acting like ‘people like us do’ (see Reay, Crozier, and Clayton 2009, 1110). It produced a self-fulfilling prophecy amongst these middle-class young people, however: observations of people being admitted to these disciplines without a course were minimal, because everyone ‘like us’ was attending one. A middle-class habitus was constructed through the participation in the private field prior to admission to status disciplines in the public field. None of our interviewees claimed that they knew anyone who was accepted to study medicine or law without having taken a preparatory course:

I have, oh well [pause], all my friends are studying, and I want to get forward here, and then it is just that if the intake [to med school] of those without a prep course is such an infinitesimal percentage, then you could practically say that you have to take a prep course to get in. (Martin, age 21 years, lower middle class, applying for the second time, on a prep course for the first time)

The myth of meritocracy (Reay, Crozier, and Clayton 2009), in which merit is defined as a combination of talent, intelligence, and effort independent of family resources (Van Zanten and Maxwell 2015), was evident in the interviews of these middle-class applicants. Admission to the public field of education was considered strongly restricted (the closure effect; Hilgers and Mangez 2015) and the discourse of personal responsibility hovered around ‘motivation’, which basically transferred the responsibility for success to individuals. Simultaneously, all of the interviewees used the discourse of social responsibility, whereby entering the field of private education was considered economically inequitable and thereby in conflict with ‘Nordic values’ of education as a public good. However, the harsh competition for positions in the public field required mechanisms for distinguishing ‘the most motivated’, and the private field provided the means for this, while constructing itself as helping out those who did not have sufficient cultural capital at home. It was acknowledged that not everyone could access the private field due to economic restrictions. The private field had introduced a scholarship system, which eventually legitimised its use in that almost ‘anyone’ could apply for tuition-fee-free positions: the link between attending and gaining a valuable position in the private field prior to accessing the public one was embedded in this social construction. The structural obstacles preventing the candidates from entering the private field were discussed as ‘lack of motivation’. In some cases this could also prevent the possible candidates from applying to the public and presumably autonomous field of higher education, as the discursive power of the presumed hidden homology was present.

Discussion and conclusions

This Bourdieusian field analysis has shown how the limits and relations of the public and private field of education were constructed through the four discourses of support, business, personal responsibility, and social responsibility. The preparatory courses in the private field base their business on uncertainty in the competitive admission process, which all our interviewees discussed mainly through the discourse of support (see also Kosunen and Haltia 2018; Holloway and Kirby 2020). The applicants thought they needed support because of the competition and uncertainty in the admission to status disciplines. The private field of education exploited this position in their marketing strategies through discourse of business, when positioning the private field as autonomous and simultaneously in relation to the public one. The reason for the candidates to attend these courses is to acquire ‘sufficient’ knowledge and style in answering in entrance examinations (legitimate academic: see Bourdieu 1996) and decrease experienced uncertainty, which the private field promises to provide, even if it does not explicitly guarantee admission. Not that it even could, as the relative autonomy of the public field is strong in the sense of student selection (Hilgers and Mangez 2015).

The consumerist idea of everyone needing a course is buffered by the construction of subject positions falling between urban legends about unbeatable geniuses as competitors in the admission process, as well as losers being left on the sidelines (see also Kosunen and Haltia 2018; Youdell 2006). The social position that was available to our middle-class young people (who were not self-excluding due to a lack of economic resources, which they acknowledged some were) is that of the educational consumer (Naidoo and Jamieson 2005) buying private supplementary tutoring, as everyone (with a middle-class habitus) around them were doing as well (see Reay, Crozier, and Clayton 2009). Participating in preparatory courses during the admission to status disciplines seems to have become a social praxis for the middle classes and a part of middle-class habitus in the field of education. The private field even manages discursively to legitimise its controversial role through the discourse of support, implying self-made policies of ‘widening participation’. When conflicted with the ethical issue of possibly increasing social inequalities due to embedded economic inequalities in a context in which such practices are still considered morally questionable, the private field had constructed a scholarship system that partly solved the problem the service itself originally created. This made it easier to discuss the applicants’ personal responsibility for their own success (and failure) given that the economic barriers of participation were ‘removed’. The myth of meritocracy (Reay, Crozier, and Clayton 2009; Liu 2011) remains strong, even if structural embedded inequalities are recognised. They simply become misrecognised as ‘motivation’. Thereby, the discourse of social responsibility of education was easily bypassed by the discourses of business and personal responsibility: private tutoring does not claim to be for education as public good. It is a service and thereby the providers are free to charge its customers as much they like.

The discourse of personal responsibility also contributed to this entity, given that taking a preparatory course is constructed as a sign of commitment and motivation, which were discussed as central parts of a successful admission process and the habitus of a successful candidate. This debate, however, misrecognises the economic restrictions as lack of motivation, which would also be a legitimate reason for exclusion from higher education within these discourses (see Bourdieu 1996). I argue that, in Bourdieusian terms (Bourdieu 1996; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) and in this context, the dominant symbolic power of transformed economic capital in the private educational field is misrecognised and naturalised in the process of admission to the universities. It is further transformed into institutionalised cultural capital (a study place and later a degree in a preferred institution) and then transmitted to the public field. This produces the discursive space for educational consumerism (Naidoo and Jamieson 2005), whereby invested economic capital in the private field of education is paid back sooner or later. This is a shared view on the preparatory course by the course providers as well as their customers. Such a discursive entity embeds endogenous privatisation (Ball and Youdell 2008) and reproduces pre-existing power structures within the public field (see Bourdieu 1996), as the private field attached to it seems economically exclusive to many.

The field of public higher education in Finland explicitly distances itself from the private field in order to perform relative autonomy (see Naidoo 2004; Bourdieu 1987) and presents its core function of providing education as a public good. The two fields are presenting themselves as autonomous, even if the private field of preparatory courses would not exist without the public field into which it targets all its actions. Additionally, the private field sells itself to the customers as having expertise over the selection procedures of the public field; which the public field even with regulations distances itself from, when people with this knowledge at universities are forbidden from participating in any the preparatory activities. The preparatory course companies in the private field are excluded from the symbolic struggles in the public field and from being recognised as legitimate academic institutions (see Bourdieu 1987), through which the relative autonomy of the public field is drawn. This is related to selection and closure conducted by public institutions (Hilgers and Mangez 2015), which results in the distribution of young people into different, more and less dominant positions in the field of public higher education.

The influence of the private field of education towards the public field exists even in Finland, as it alters the possession of legitimate and valuable capital and changes the structure of positions in the public field, which can be called a deficit of autonomy (Hilgers and Mangez 2015, 20). The two parallel and reputably autonomous fields of education produce their dominant agents in a manner that eventually leads to the accumulation of field-specific capital that possibly ‘reproduces the principles of social class and other forms of domination under the cloak of academic neutrality’ (Naidoo 2004, 460). This (presumed) homology of fields contributes to the reproduction of social positions, as the private organisation, particularly the preparatory courses, reshapes the practices of selection to public universities. The public field (policy elites) tries to avoid the biasing power of preparatory courses in succeeding in the admissions by altering their admission protocols. However, the candidates with restricted economic capital might self-exclude themselves from applying to the public field, as they presume that acquisition of cultural capital (through preparatory courses) in the private field is ‘required’ in the competitive situation for places in the public field.

Based on this analysis, I claim that the homology (Bourdieu 1996; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) between the public and private fields of higher education is altering the relative autonomy of the field of public education, despite the fact that it does not emerge through a concrete intervention by the private sector, but rather as relational. Mobilising economic capital, transforming it into cultural capital, and transmitting it from the private to public field is considered a possible and largely utilised tool of gaining access to public higher education. This alters the relations between actors (candidates) in the competition over the dominant (admitted in status disciplines) positions in the public field of higher education. The logic is a hidden homology also possibly reproducing social positions in the society and legitimising them again in the field of public education (Bourdieu 1996). This raises a whole range of questions concerning social justice, such as the position of those who cannot afford a preparatory course, as well as those who take several preparatory courses but are still never admitted to study in public universities.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the Kone Foundation for funding this study and the two anonymous reviewers for very valuable feedback. The author also thanks PhD Nina Haltia for constructive comments on the earlier versions of this article.

Declaration of interest statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Koneen Säätiö.

Notes

1 The term public is used here as an indicator of tuition-fee-free higher education in established universities, of which there are 14 in Finland. They receive on average about 80% of their funding directly from the government, also taking into account the funding of the Academy of Finland. The concept ‘public’ could still be debated given that under the 2010 Universities Act universities officially became independent corporations under public law or foundations under private law (Foundations Act).

2 There are some indications that the role of foreign private universities operating on their own campuses in the Helsinki metropolitan area is strengthening, but they do not belong to the Finnish system of higher education, and thereby tend to be ignored in academic analyses. The private universities therefore remain as ‘outsiders’. Private universities are issuing European Union-accredited diplomas, hence their value on the international labour market remains to be seen (Kosunen 2018).