Youth mobilities in elite schools: elite circuit, reflexive youth biographies and their mobility blips

Abstract

This paper presents the biographies of elite students and their purposeful mobilities. Their biographies are constructed from Skype interviews following their second year out of school. The focus of this paper is to trace the travel trajectories of a small set of students whose post school lives show what a reality check looks like outside the “social paradise” of their school. Situating the paper in the “new mobilities paradigm”, the conceptual apparatus of elite circuit is introduced to argue that because of their class advantage, elite youth are able to route and re-route themselves back to a secure future in spite of their mobility blips. The study of elite youth and their mobilities therefore brings issues of power, privilege and class advantage to the fore that also sheds light to our understanding of wider social inequalities, class making and its reproduction.

Keywords:

• Elite circuit
• elite schools
• youth mobility
• structure/agency
• habitus

Notes

1. This research project has been funded by the Australian Research Council [DP1093778], as well as by Monash, Melbourne, Cardiff, Roehamption and Illinois Universities, the Education University of Hong Kong and the National Institute of Education Singapore. The team consists of Jane Kenway and Johannah Fahey (Monash), Debbie Epstein (Roehampton), Aaron Koh (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Fazal Rizvi (Melbourne) and Cameron McCarthy (Illinois).

2. To protect the identity of the schools, the names of schools mentioned in this paper have been anonymized.

3. All the names in the youth biographies are fictitious.

4. The PSC scholarship is considered to be a prestigious scholarship given out by the Singapore government although there exist different tiers of PSC scholarship, the highest and most prestigious is the President’s Scholarship. Students awarded the scholarship enters the elite Administrative Service after they have completed their study. Depending on the type of scholarship awarded and years of study, the recipient is required to serve a bond of 4–6 years. According to one recent study, between 2002 and 2011, 580 such scholarship was given out (Ye and Nylander 2015, 17). More information about the PSC scholarship can be obtained from the portal www.pscscholarships.gov.sg.