Cultural Capital and Access to Highly Selective Education: The Case of Admission to Oxford

This chapter investigates whether cultural capital influences the chances of being offered a place for undergraduate study at the University of Oxford. We examine the extent to which measures of cultural capital, operationalised as both cultural involvement and cultural knowledge, mediate the effects of other social background characteristics. We find that cultural knowledge, rather than participation in the beaux arts per se, helps to predict the chance of getting a place at Oxford. Differences in cultural capital, however, cannot account for most of the differences in admissions rates by gender, ethnicity and class. The fact that we find a professional class advantage which cannot be explained by differences in cultural resources may be seen as running counter to Bourdieu's postulation of cultural capital as the main differentiator between fractions of the middle class.