








































Emerging Perspectives 
ep.journalhosting.ucalgary.ca 

Corresponding author: summer.cowley@mail.utoronto.ca 

 
Socioeconomic Status, Bourdieu’s Capitals, and Higher Education Attainment 

Summer Juliet Cowley 

University of Toronto 

Attaining a degree from a higher education institution has the potential to positively 
affect students’ career outcomes and to enable their social mobility through the 
acquisition of powerful social and cultural capitals in the form of social relationships 
and credentials. However, the path to acquisition of these capitals varies between 
individuals from different demographic backgrounds. Through unequal access to and 
participation in various K-12 schooling and extracurricular activities, students gain 
powerful social and cultural capital at unequal rates leading up to the transition from 
secondary to post-secondary schooling. Through gaining different capitals via early 
schooling experiences, students engage with higher education in ways that are 
stratified by socioeconomic status. 

Keywords: higher education, Bourdieu, socioeconomic status 

Cowley, S.J. (2020). Socioeconomic status, Bourdieu’s capitals, and higher education 
attainment. Emerging Perspectives, 4(2), 51-66. 

 

A country’s rate of post-secondary educational attainment by its citizens can be interpreted 
as an indicator of its prosperity and standard of living (Bauer, Schweitzer, & Shane, 2006; 
Eurostat, 2018). Canada currently enjoys one of the world’s higher participation rates in post-
secondary education; with 54% of Canadians aged 25-64 holding some form of higher education 
qualifications. Canada lies well above the Organization for Economic Cooperation and 
Development (OECD) countries’ average of 36.7% (Statistics Canada, 2017). The variety of 
higher education options available to students in Canada ranges from short-term continuing 
education or certificate programs, through to baccalaureate and advanced university degrees 
(Statistics Canada, 2017). With a vast array of available post-secondary programs (Universities 
Canada, 2019) and with available government funding and student loans (Government of 
Canada, 2019), it may seem as though all Canadians have the opportunity to enjoy improved 
personal success through working diligently to graduate from higher education institutions. In 
such a scenario, the image of higher education as a social and economic equalizer drives students 
and families to prioritize post-secondary schooling (Marginson, 2016) in pursuit of higher 
salaries, higher social status, and improved long-term outcomes over the span of an individual’s 
life (Elder, Johnson, & Crosnoe, 2003; Marginson, 2016). With seemingly widely accessible 
higher education opportunities, talented and capable students from all socioeconomic 



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backgrounds may consider themselves poised to leverage their abilities in the pursuit of 
economic and social gains. 

However, higher education attainment is not a wholly meritocratic process but instead is 
strongly linked to the socioeconomic status, demographic characteristics, and economic, social, 
cultural, and symbolic capitals of students (e.g. Davies & Aurini, 2011; Parekh & Gaztambide-
Fernández, 2017). In the context of readily available higher education, individuals lacking the 
inherited and economic capital common to the privileged children of advantaged families are 
able to strive for increased social and material advantage through successful completion of post-
secondary programs. However, the route to and through higher education is neither as simple nor 
as equitable as many individuals and families might hope. Individuals from historically 
disadvantaged groups remain disadvantaged in their pathways leading up to and moving through 
post-secondary schooling (Davies & Aurini, 2011; Frempong, Ma, & Mensah, 2012; Perry & 
McConney, 2010). Rather than empowering students through engagement with new intellectual 
challenges and broader social environments, it has been argued that current higher education 
systems result in the strengthening of existing social stratification and the replication of pre-
existing patterns of inequity in incomes (Corak, 2013) and in broader society (Marginson, 2016). 
In order to effectively address the inequities that individuals hope to remedy through higher 
education, researchers should consider systemic inequities that exist at earlier points in the 
schooling process.  

Higher Education Attainment: Unequal Beginnings, Unequal Paths, Unequal Results 

In Canada in particular and North America in general, children born to wealthier families 
from dominant linguistic, ethnic, and religious groups, and who live in affluent neighbourhoods 
tend to find greater success in the school system than their peers of ethnic, linguistic, and 
religious minorities and of lower socioeconomic classes, who live in poorer neighbourhoods 
(Kohen, Oliver, & Fritz, 2009). The compounding effects of socioeconomic disadvantages on 
schooling success begin to accumulate in early childhood and grow through primary and 
secondary schooling, continuing into and through higher education (Hannon, 2003; Kao & 
Thompson, 2003; Maaz, Trautwein, Ludtke, & Baumert, 2008). These effects have been seen 
across broad categories, with voices in the literature pointing to early childhood as a crucial 
moment for education in order for students to have an equitable playing field in university and 
college (Heckman, 2011; Reynolds, Temple, Robertson, & Mann, 2001; Reynolds, Temple, Ou, 
Arteaga, & White, 2011). Since inequities affecting early childhood are tightly bound to 
inequities affecting families and parents, the entirety of the systemic inequities of a society play 
into any student’s schooling experiences and educational success and attainment, whether 
positively or negatively.  

 Looking forward through students’ educational pathways, this article argues that 
inequities within society are not reduced by individuals’ formal schooling. Rather, according to 
the literature cited throughout this article, the schooling process serves to reproduce and maintain 
the inequities of the surrounding social context through the stratified nature of K-12 schooling 
systems. Schools in neighbourhoods of lower socioeconomic status often have fewer resources 
and amenities than schools in neighbourhoods of higher socioeconomic status and, perhaps more 



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pertinently, children living in neighbourhoods of lower socioeconomic status have lower 
academic achievement than those living in higher socioeconomic status ones, regardless of the 
presence or absence of school poverty (Wodtke & Parbst, 2017). From unequal beginnings, 
individuals experience inequities in their schooling experiences that compound over time. These 
inequities may be maintained due to unequal accumulations of markers denoting economic, 
social, cultural, and symbolic status, which are referred to as capitals (Bourdieu & Passeron, 
1990; Bourdieu, 1986). That is, the capitals that an individual bears and acquires through their 
life act as both markers of success and prerequisites to success, creating a causality paradox 
(where capitals are needed to gain capitals) that bars true social mobility (Marginson, 2016).  

Capitals and Schooling 

Consider the distribution of capitals at the moment of a person’s birth. When an individual 
is born, they are born into a particular country, region, city/town, and neighbourhood, to a 
particular family unit within a larger social milieu, within a particular culture with its various 
religious and cultural practices, and within an environment in which particular languages are 
spoken, particular jobs are worked in the local area, and older individuals serve as various 
positive or negative exemplars. Through the lottery of birth, any individual’s positioning within 
society can be highly advantageous, disadvantageous, or mixed, and each individual has the 
duration of their life to try to position themselves as best they can into their surrounding 
physical, social, and mental environment in a way that they can enjoy or at least that they can 
bear. For individuals born into positions of economic, social, or cultural privilege, attaining a 
satisfying position in life is aided by the wealth of opportunity afforded to them at birth. For 
those born into disadvantageous positions, additional effort must be put into attaining the 
objective manifestations and symbolic markers of status that help their more advantaged peers to 
succeed. These markers of status have been described by Bourdieu as capitals (Bourdieu, 1986 
Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990) and go beyond the financial definition of capital as the 
accumulation and measurement of monetary wealth. Similar to economic capital, the other 
capitals are theorized to bestow advantage upon their bearers in the contexts which define them.  

The capitals, as outlined by Bourdieu (1986; 1988) and Bourdieu and Passeron (1990), 
include economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital.  In brief, economic capital refers to 
money and wealth; cultural capital refers to markers of possession of rare and valued traits 
within a society, such as a particular rank or a particular certification; social capital refers to 
relationships and connections between people; and symbolic capital refers to the perceived value 
or power of a person through the eyes of others (Bourdieu, 1986; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990). 
The markers of status—capitals—within economic, cultural, social, and symbolic contexts, relate 
to the position that an individual holds within their society (Bourdieu, 1986). So, social mobility 
appears as though it should be possible through the acquisition of diverse forms of capital. 
Consider formal schooling: through education, individuals have the opportunity to strengthen 
existing skills, acquire new ones, make social connections with other individuals and groups, and 
eventually gain certifications and credentials that mark the successful completion of their 
educational program. However, individuals’ engagement with formal schooling systems and 
acquisition of various forms of capital may depend too heavily on the socioeconomic status and 
social connectedness of their families to provide equitable access to the capital-building benefits 



Cowley - Emerging Perspectives (2020)  54 

 

 

that schooling can offer. Through implicit or incidental filtering processes, students may be 
divided into groups based on socioeconomic status and demographic characteristics. For 
example, consider situations in which students can only participate in certain school and 
extracurricular programs if they are able to pay program fees or be available outside of the 
regular school-schedule. In these scenarios, school populations can become divided by 
possession of economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capitals. These divisions in access can 
result in an environment in which opportunity to acquire capitals is largely available only to 
those who already possess them in large amounts. Now, let us consider literature that describes 
in greater depth the ways in which achievement-boosting capitals accrue at variable rates over 
time. 

 Literature pertinent to the arguments of this paper covers three major domains: K-12 
schooling registration, explicit and implicit within- and between-school streaming practices, and 
higher education achievement and attainment. The theoretical frameworks used to analyze these 
phenomena include Bourdieu and Passeron’s (1990) framework of social reproduction and 
economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capitals and Marginson’s (2016) framing of “The 
universal family desire for betterment” (p. 414) through education as driving global growth in 
high participation higher education systems. Below, I discuss the ways in which the presence or 
accumulation of various forms of capital affects students’ schooling trajectories. Combined, 
findings from these three bodies of related literature indicate that the inequalities that are present 
at an individual’s birth persist over time and that the achievement gaps between advantaged and 
disadvantaged students early in formal schooling widen as students advance through K-12 
schooling and into higher education. One such process of socioeconomic stratification occurs 
even before children are exposed to inequitable school activities: parental choice of school for 
their children.  

Unequal Beginnings: Families, Neighbourhoods, and K-12 School Choice 

An examination of K-12 education in Canada reminds us that although education systems 
in Canada are governed by separate provincial and territorial governments and can differ broadly 
between jurisdictions as a result, some general statements apply to Canada’s K-12 schooling as a 
whole. First, elementary student school choice is often bounded by location within the province, 
town, or city (e.g. Government of Ontario, 2013) and although families may request to enroll 
their children into schools outside of their home neighbourhood, their acceptance into the schools 
may be determined via lottery, interview by school administrators, or on a first-come-first-served 
basis (e.g. Edmonton Public Schools, 2013a, Saskatoon Public Schools, 2005; Vancouver School 
Board, 2018). The matter of parental choice in school registration creates opportunities for 
inequitable registration patterns. When school enrollment is bound solely by location and there is 
no opportunity to choose a school other than the one designated by the school district, then 
student enrollment is dependent upon the neighbourhood in which they live. These scenarios can 
create a system of filtration or segregation in schools by wealth, as families’ abilities to enroll 
their students into particular schools is determined by their ability to afford to live in particular 
neighbourhoods. Although scholars have noted neighbourhood effects on academic achievement 
(Chetty, Hendren, & Katz, 2016; Kohen, Leventhal, Dahinten, & McIntosh, 2008; Kohen, 



Cowley - Emerging Perspectives (2020)  55 

 

 

Oliver, & Pierre, 2008; Wodtke, Harding, & Elwert, 2011), the accumulation of social capital 
through in-school relationship-building creates an additional form of capital accumulation 
outside of purely academic bounds. That is, by living in a particular neighbourhood, students 
build social relationships with students from the same neighbourhood and accumulate social 
capital along lines divided by economic capital. 

When families are able to choose the schools in which students are enrolled, then 
registration patterns may be affected by families’ differing transportation patterns for getting 
their children to the school (Larsen et al., 2009); importance placed by the family upon specific 
school types (Davies & Aurini, 2008); and overall family beliefs about the importance of 
schooling and the ways in which it should take place (Davies & Aurini, 2011). In these 
scenarios, families’ hopes of improving their children’s future careers and social status through 
education (Marginson, 2016) are, unbeknownst to the families, supported to varying degrees 
depending on the ways that the families interpret and address the matter of engagement with 
their children’s formal schooling. For families who are aware of the significance placed by 
others on particular types of schools and school programs, it may be more obvious which types 
of schools and which types of school programs would best help them to achieve an advantageous 
position. For families who recognize the significance of education but are unaware of the 
nuances that others around them may see in school choice, the relative advantages of their 
children’s school may be largely left to chance. Through lack of knowledge regarding the school 
environments and programs that may confer greater social, academic, cultural and symbolic 
capital advantages on their children, parents may miss opportunities for their children to build 
their stores of the various capitals and be perceived more favourably by others as they progress 
through formal schooling. After the issue of registration in a school is addressed, analysis of the 
unequal paths through K-12 schooling can begin with questions of how school administrators, 
teachers, and staff perceive students and interpret their interests, behaviours, and abilities, and 
how those perceptions can result in student streaming. 

Unequal Pathways: Within- and Between-School Streaming 

Streaming, in the context of K-12 education, describes processes by which students are 
separated into groups based on school assessments of academic and social characteristics 
(Schroeter & James, 2015). Also known as tracking, streaming has been criticized as subjective 
and biased (Gaztambide-Fernández, Saifer, & Desai, 2013; Tsuchida, 2016). These streaming 
practices, which have led to different secondary schooling preparation for students from different 
socioeconomic classes, ethnicities, and genders (Chmielewski, 2015), may lead to different 
exposure to concepts, training, instructors, peer groups, and most damningly, different 
expectations of career and post-secondary futures (Gaztambide- Fernández et al, 2013; Schroeter 
& James, 2015). For example, when high-achieving students are streamed into classrooms with 
peers of similar ability levels, they tend to receive higher grades than before they were streamed 
while their peers streamed into a non-academic designation do not, resulting in an increase in the 
achievement gaps between students streamed into academic and non-academic streams (Johnston 
& Wildy, 2016). Similarly, students in the academic stream in Ontario in grades 9 and 10 take 
university-level courses in the last grades of high school, while their peers in the applied stream 



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enroll in college-level courses, setting students from each stream along different academic 
pathways (Brown, 2010; Parekh, 2013). Here, the issue of streaming broadens the discussion of 
the relationship of socioeconomics to higher education attainment and adds the spectre of gender 
and race-based discrimination. The effects of streaming, however, are not agreed upon in 
education literature. Between-school streaming is described as subsidiary to neighbourhood 
effects on student achievement (Wodtke & Parbst, 2017) and, conversely, as perpetuating 
inequality (Betts, 2011). Similarly, Schroeter and James (2015) found that, regardless of school 
administrators’ best intentions in streaming students to provide language-background-specific 
instruction, separating students into groups can have unwanted negative impacts on students’ 
self-perception and on students’ perceptions of the school. However, when comparing the effects 
of within- and between-school streaming and course-by-course tracking in 14 countries and 
regions across Europe and Asia, Chmielewski, Dumont, and Trautwein (2013) found that 
students’ self-concept of academic ability varied depending on the type of streaming/tracking 
environment they were placed in. Within Canada specifically−and according to the scholars cited 
above−streaming is not currently well-received. 

Within the Canadian context, the effects of streaming are described in bleak terms. In 
studies focused on First Nations students, racial bias was found to frequently result in inaccurate 
placement of First Nations students into non-academic or general streams (Galabuzi 2014; Riley 
& Ungerleider, 2011). In the Ontario public school system, teacher and family attitudes towards 
streaming have been recorded as largely negative, with participants displeased with their 
impressions that race, gender, and socioeconomic class are more predictive of where students are 
streamed than is academic ability (Kinon, 2016). In Toronto, where Fogliato (2017) and 
Tsuchida (2016) echoed arguments from broader contexts that streaming can negatively impact 
student self-perception (Riley & Ungerleider, 2011; Rubie-Davies et al., 2010; Schroeter & 
James, 2015), the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) has begun to enact de-streaming 
processes (Toronto District School Board, 2018). De-streaming processes described by the 
TDSB include a move away from separate classes for students “generally identified with the 
exceptionalities of Learning Disability, Autism, Language Impairment or Mild Intellectual 
Disability” (Toronto District School Board, 2009, p. 2) and the inclusion of those students into 
“the regular class at their neighbourhood school” (Toronto District School Board, 2013b, p. 12). 
Through de-streaming, it is hoped that social inequalities made worse by inequitable streaming 
processes might be remedied. However, with the continued existence of specialty programs 
across public schools in Canada, family and student self-selection into particular pathways 
through K-12 schooling goes on. Whether through student choice or parent advocacy, students 
continue to be divided through programming participation in which students of higher 
socioeconomic status and in the hegemonic majority are overrepresented in academic and “elite” 
programs (Parekh & Gaztambide- Fernández, 2016). 

In a context of inequitable student streaming, the potential for loss and gain of various 
capitals is high. When streamed into a high-status group, a student may experience an increase in 
societally-valued academic and social capital, while another student streamed into a different, 
lower-status group may experience the opposite. Separate from the symbolic and social capital at 
stake when gaining membership into one or another group through streaming, individual students 



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will be exposed to different content, instructional styles, instructors, and peers (Kalogrides & 
Loeb, 2013). Through exposure to these differing phenomena students in different streams at 
school will find themselves acquiring different social, cultural, and symbolic capitals than their 
peers in different streams (Galabuzi, 2014).  

To understand the ways in which the capitals held by students affect the outcome of 
streaming decisions, teachers’ judgments of students’ abilities must be considered. Although 
parental expectations of students (Rubie-Davies et al., 2010) and involvement in schools 
(Altschul, 2010) have been found to influence student outcomes and experiences at school, 
decisions to stream students are often catalysed by teacher judgments (Glock, Krolak-
Schwerdt,Klapproth, & Böhmer, 2013; Kalogrides & Loeb, 2013). Studies of the relationships 
between the various capitals and teacher expectations of academic achievement have emphasized 
the need for acknowledgment of the impact on streaming decisions of teachers’ implicit biases 
against students who are not members of the dominant ethnic, religious, or cultural groups (Riley 
& Ungerleider, 2012; Smaller, 2014; Van den Bergh, Denessen, Hornstra, Voeten, & Holland, 
2010). When implicit biases are seen as related to perceptions of the economic, social, cultural, 
and symbolic capitals held by another, they can be interpreted as affecting the acquisition of 
capital and as powerful factors in students’ eventual educational achievement and attainment. 

Unequal Results: Higher Education Entry and Attainment 

Finally, by the time the application window for post-secondary institutions opens for 
students in their final year of high school, the window for effective intervention and practical 
assistance programs has already begun to close. For groups of students who have been 
historically disadvantaged or underrepresented in higher education attendance, support programs 
are most powerful when they take place well in advance of the application process itself, as in 
the College Horizons program for Native American students detailed in Keene (2018). In 
addition to practical aid, early support may help to combat self-stratification, a process whereby 
high achieving students from lower socioeconomic classes may choose not to apply to higher-
ranked institutions, removing themselves from the competition before it begins (Kao & 
Thompson, 2003; Marginson, 2016). In fact, the choice to pursue higher education in Canada has 
been found to vary with ethnicity (Abada, Hou, & Ram, 2008; Abada & Tenkorang, 2009a; 
Gordon & White, 2014), socioeconomic status (Caro, 2009), urban versus rural residence 
(Newbold & Brown, 2015), gender (Abada & Tenkorang, 2009a), and language background 
(Grayson, 2009). Given the economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capitals apparent in the 
diverse characteristics associated with differences in Canadian higher education attainment, it 
would be prudent to reflect upon how capitals play into higher education attendance and 
attainment. 

Higher education enrollment and attainment are related to the family and parental capitals 
of students, which are often comorbid with socioeconomic status and demographic 
characteristics. The importance placed upon higher education by families in Canada and the 
kinds of higher education that are accessed varies, often dependent upon students’ own 
demographic characteristics and on those of parents. Abada and Tenkorang (2009a), for 
example, found that educational attainment of female children of immigrants into Canada is 



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more strongly tied to their mothers’ education, whereas male children’s attainment was tied to a 
self-identified sense of ethnic ancestry. These connections between higher education attainment 
and parent and family capitals suggest the significance of social and cultural forces similar to 
those noted by Grayson (2009), who found that ethnic and language background relate to 
students’ university Grade Point Averages (GPAs), with Canadian-born anglophones achieving 
generally higher GPAs and Korean, Black, and South Asian students generally lower. The family 
capitals implicit in students’ socioeconomic status, ethnicity, gender, immigration status, 
language background, and educational achievement highlight the importance of recognizing the 
ways in which formal schooling is not meritocratic. Although individual students and their 
families may desire social mobility through educational attainment (Marginson, 2016), their 
achievement, to a certain extent, may be hindered by the characteristics of their parents or 
families (Picot & Hou, 2012; Sen & Clemente, 2010)—factors entirely outside of students’ 
control. 

Higher education attainment levels and their connection to socioeconomic status and 
demographic characteristics are the final set of circumstances in this discussion of the inequitable 
pathways from birth through schooling. Although completing higher levels of university 
education may provide some economic status gains in Canada (Statistics Canada, 2013), this 
improvement of career outcomes through education is not equally accessible across 
socioeconomic status or ethnicity. In their analysis of data from 42,476 survey respondents from 
diverse backgrounds in Canada, Abada and Tenkorang (2009) found that race was related to 
enrollment in or completion of higher education, with South Asian and Chinese individuals the 
most likely to obtain a university degree, and with Black respondents “25% less likely than 
Whites to be in university rather than high school or community college” (p. 195). Writing on 
differences between people from different ethnic groups in education and career outcomes in 
Canada, Kunz, Schetagne, and Milan (2001) found that “regardless of education, non-racialized 
groups still fare the best in terms of employment. On a national as well as regional level, non-
racialized groups had the lowest unemployment rate, especially if they had a university 
education” (p. 18). In a study of individuals who attended post-secondary schooling, Bastedo and 
Jacquette (2010) found that while the number of students from low socioeconomic status 
backgrounds to attend higher education increased significantly from 1972 to 2004, growth “is 
concentrated in community colleges and non-competitive 4-year institutions” (p. 326). Similarly, 
when looking at longitudinal survey data from 12,376 students in the United States, Walpole 
(2003) found that “low SES students have lower incomes, lower levels of educational attainment, 
and lower levels of educational aspirations than their peers from higher social strata nine years 
after college entry” (Walpole, 2003, p. 263). In such a situation, it may seem that little hope can 
be offered to families and individual students in Canada with an interest in upward social 
mobility. Individual mobility, as discussed above, is hampered by inequitable accumulations of 
various capitals through life; and intergenerational mobility, though present, is not agreed upon 
as a strong or weak force (Aydemir, Chen, & Corak, 2009; Pfeffer, 2008; Sen & Clemente, 
2010). To address unequal educational attainment, one must consider the roots of the inequities 
faced by students and look beyond the short timeframe in which students apply to and register in 
higher education institutions.  



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Unequal Ranges of Opportunity: Possible Interventions 

Several large and small-scale early interventions might offer some aid. These interventions 
could include early childhood education and K-12 outreach; subsidized high-status 
extracurricular programs (e.g. hockey, gymnastics, dance); termination of streaming/tracking in 
K-12 education; and mandatory teacher training coursework addressing social stratification in 
society and in schooling. Let us consider the potential impact of each of these attempts to 
mediate the unequal distribution of the capitals throughout society and their corresponding 
shortcomings. 

Outreach 

First, consider outreach programs in early childhood education and K-12 schooling. 
Programs focused on increasing academic achievement for students with lower socioeconomic 
statuses (e.g. ABC Headstart, 2018) may enable these individuals to develop academic 
capabilities (e.g. Phillips, Gormley, & Anderson, 2016) and to benefit from high-expectation 
schooling environments. However, given that parents must take action to seek out such programs 
and enrol their children in them, these programs may require connections to parental-education 
programs. 

High-status Activities 

Certain extracurricular activities in Canadian schools, such as hockey, are expensive, 
creating a de facto filtration system by socioeconomic class. Participation in activities such as 
hockey and other organized sports may confer social, cultural, and symbolic capital. Subsidizing 
such programs has the opportunity to provide students with lower socioeconomic statuses or 
from groups outside of the hegemonic majority with capital-building experiences, expectations, 
and relationships (Holt, Kingsley, Tink, & Sherer, 2011). On the other hand, continued 
valorization of elite activities such as hockey perpetuates the value system of the hegemonic 
majority while doing nothing to raise the capital that can be accrued through participation in 
other cultural activities.  

Terminating Streaming 

Putting an end to streaming/tracking practices in Canadian K-12 schools and to the 
corresponding separation of students by perceived ability provides the same classroom 
environments for all students and the same access to capital-building experiences (Parekh & 
Gaztambide-Fernández, 2017). Nonetheless, with family choice in specialty program registration 
still available, the possibility for student division into in-group and out-group will continue.  

Teacher Training 

Since inequity for students begins in early childhood, with access to educational services 
and access to teachers with strong skills and high expectations, the field of education should turn 
to teacher and administrator training in the K-12 systems within Canada as sites for potential 
intervention. By providing teacher candidates instruction on the deleterious effects of social 
stratification and its reproduction in education systems, small steps might be taken towards 



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building more equitable school and higher education experiences for Canada’s youth (Reifer & 
Davis, 2011). This suggests the significance of educational foundations aspects of teacher 
education, in which philosophical, historical, and potentially political content is made integral to 
teacher training.  

Shortcomings of the Interventions 

Overall, these potential interventions have the possibility to improve educational 
experiences for students from underserved populations. However, various pitfalls in each 
intervention exist. Most notable in the current Ontario education context, the movement towards 
de-streaming is fundamentally flawed in that it removes some of the opportunity for 
individualized support for students who benefit greatly from advanced academic placement or 
targeted remedial skill building. Noting this flaw, the Toronto District School Board (2018), 
although it supports de-streaming processes in general, “[does] not recommend phasing out 
Gifted programs” (p. 11). Although speciality programs exist that focus on the delivery of 
specific programs−such as French immersion, advanced placement, fine arts (Toronto District 
School Board, 2014)−the onus to become aware of and enrol in these program is placed on 
parents and families (Toronto District School Board, 2018, p. 12). As de-streaming moves 
towards a general model of education, students who require either more challenging material or 
more structured support may be underserved by “one-size-fits-all” school programming. Another 
notable downside of interventions aimed at increasing access to high-status capital-building 
activities and organizations is that this method does not attempt to change the kinds of capitals 
that are valued in broader society. Teacher training as an intervention, for example, ignores the 
larger problem of systemic inequities in broader society and widespread discriminatory processes 
and practices faced by groups. Nonetheless, given that teacher assessment of student capabilities 
can affect student streaming decisions where streaming exists (Glock et al., 2013; Kalogrides & 
Loeb, 2013), and given the significance of implicit biases to children’s academic achievement 
(Riley & Ungerleider, 2012; Smaller, 2014; Van den Bergh et al., 2010), interventions aimed at 
teachers’ perceptions of students have the possibility of creating more equitable outcomes for the 
students in their care. 

Conclusion 

There are vast numbers of students who participate in higher education in Canada (Skolnik, 
2018) but the levels at which they participate are stratified by a variety of factors, including 
gender, race, and socioeconomic class (Krahn & Taylor, 2005). Before students begin to choose 
the schools to which they want to apply, their perceptions of where they best fit in the higher 
education system have already been shaped by the expectations of their family, K-12 teachers, 
and peers (Marginson, 2016). Despite variable success rates for individuals from minoritized 
(non-dominant) and hegemonic majority (dominant) groups, the range of opportunities for each 
group of students appears to be unevenly distributed.  

With the possible interventions and their corresponding shortcomings that have been 
discussed above, the appropriate direction seems unclear. Given the “chicken-or-the-egg” 
problem of needing capitals to build capitals, it seems likely that a two-tiered (at minimum) 



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confrontation of inequity is required. Beginning with groups and individuals of lower 
socioeconomic status or outside of the hegemonic majority, greater higher education attainment 
and greater benefit from higher education attainment may be pursued through strategic 
participation in school and extracurricular programming. By this means, upward social mobility 
can be envisioned as a process of scaling a high mountain through preparing for the obstacles 
that lie ahead and choosing the best teammates with which to make that climb. This method of 
addressing inequity takes a deficit approach to the situation and aims at increasing highly valued 
social, cultural, and symbolic capital markers to achieve the betterment to which Marginson 
(2016) refers. In opposition to this analogy of climbing a single steep mountain, a twinned 
approach involves looking to other heights to be climbed and elevating the symbolic value of 
different characteristics and experiences and the capitals that they can confer. In this scenario, 
rather than accepting the value of the capitals of the hegemonic majority and trying to train to 
gain those capitals, students, families, and groups can advocate for the value of the social, 
symbolic, and cultural capitals of something that builds capitals separate from those of the 
current majority. Although it seems likely that neither of these approaches alone will solve the 
problems of inequity in formal schooling and higher education attainment discussed here, a slow 
movement of broad societal perceptions may help to build more equitable systems for future 
students. 

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	Higher Education Attainment: Unequal Beginnings, Unequal Paths, Unequal Results
	Capitals and Schooling

	Unequal Beginnings: Families, Neighbourhoods, and K-12 School Choice
	Unequal Pathways: Within- and Between-School Streaming
	Unequal Results: Higher Education Entry and Attainment
	Unequal Ranges of Opportunity: Possible Interventions
	Outreach
	High-status Activities
	Terminating Streaming
	Teacher Training
	Shortcomings of the Interventions

	Conclusion
	References

