As a result of educational policy discussions about support for elites and excellence, the advancement of highly gifted students, and how to achieve top international performance in the German education system, there has also been an increased horizontal differentiation in the gymnasiumFootnote 1 education landscape, particularly over the course of the past two decades. Two key driving forces are behind these developments. First, the German educational system has undergone processes of internationalization and globalization in this period. Second, strategies of New Public Management along with the demand for and promotion of profile-building measures and competition between individual schools have resulted in processes of pronounced vertical differentiation and hierarchy formation between institutions of higher education (cf. Helsper et al., 2019, p. 13; Maxwell et al., 2018).

The new and increasingly exclusive institutions of higher education, which, however, represent only a small segment of the spectrum of secondary education, also include expanding numbers of international schools, gymnasiums for gifted students, and schools with specific talent promotion profiles, such as elite schools of sport or the arts (cf. Ullrich, 2014, pp. 186–193). Such schools are also characterized by specific admission and selection procedures, which, in the case of international schools, are based on habitual interviews with parents and their willingness to pay high school fees and, in the case of schools with special talent development profiles, on performance or aptitude tests (cf. Helsper & Krüger, 2015, p. 17).

This paper examines the effects of changing modes of transition in a highly segmented educational system that also provides designated spaces for the education of internationally mobile educational elites and future functional elites in the social fields of sport, dance, music, and art. It focuses on a—at least in the German context—little-researched example of the institutional modes of doing transitions available to students on such exclusive educational pathways in their transitions from school to university or work. It is particularly interested in whether and how the provision of an exceptional school infrastructure secures corresponding career paths, the role that the interplay between institutional demands, regulations, and spaces of opportunity and young adults’ biographical orientations plays, and how such transitions are embedded in different milieu-specific spaces of experience.

Despite the increasing importance of these schools, the corresponding research situation in Germany is rather limited, particularly in terms of the significance of such schools in students’ transitions to university or work. In this chapter, I draw on the results of a qualitative longitudinal study on adolescents’ educational careers from the tenth grade at secondary schools with different exclusive educational purposes until 2 years after graduation. The schools studied include: a privately run international school that awards the International Baccalaureate (IB) and promises on its homepage, among other benefits, its graduates access to renowned universities across the globe; second, two state-run gymnasiums with different profiles in the areas of dance, music and/or art, which cooperate closely with nearby art or music colleges and seek to prepare students not only for the “Abitur”, but also, through additional course offerings, for a corresponding educational and subsequent professional career in the arts; and, third, a state-run sports high school, a so-called elite school of sport, which offers a broad range of athletic programs that aim at enabling talented young athletes achieve top athletic performance in the future while maintaining the potential that students can acquire (post-) secondary educational qualifications (see also DOSB, 2017).

In the following, I present the state of research including the longitudinal study’s findings on the school-cultural demands of the studied schools (1). I then outline the study’s theoretical and methodological frames of reference (2) and present the spectrum of the young adults’ career trajectories and individual orientations particularly before and after their transition to higher education or professional careers (3). The article concludes with a discussion of the results of the longitudinal study against the background of research to date as well as the findings of current reflexive transition research (4).

Exclusive Profile Schools and Students’ Later Careers: State of the Art

Although the history of international schools in West Germany goes back as far as the 1950s and 1960s, this type of school has experienced an enormous surge in the past two decades, especially in the wake of globalization and internationalization processes, not only globally (cf. Ball & Nikita, 2014) but in West German metropolitan regions in particular. In 2019, for example, there were 84 schools offering one or more IB® programs; 55 of these are privately run (ibo.org, 04.12.19). These private IB schools are no longer chosen only by families of professionally transnationally mobile executives, but also by wealthy and powerful German parents who presumably hope that the acquisition of international school certificates will provide their children with optimal preparation for globalized education and labor markets.

Despite the expansion of these schools, research on the topic is limited. In addition to Hornberg (2010) and Hallwirth’s (2013) systematizations of their historical development, organizational forms, and educational content and Zymek (2015) and Ullrich’s (2014) secondary analytical studies on these schools’ distribution in metropolitan regions, the longitudinal study at the center of this chapter investigated the school-cultural educational claims of an IB School, drawing on school documents and an expert interview with the school principal. In addition to the concept of lifelong learning and the promotion of international cosmopolitanism, the school principal specifically placed the concept of “academic excellence” at the center of his self-presentation of the school’s programs. Specifically, he emphasized his school’s preparatory function for those who plan to study at renowned international universities (cf. Keßler & Krüger, 2018, p. 215).

To date, students’ educational careers at these schools have not been studied in Germany, especially in terms of the transition from secondary to post-secondary education. Research on the topic in the Anglo-American-speaking world is to some degree more developed (see overview in Resnik, 2012; Naudet, 2015). Hayden et al.’s (2000) somewhat older quantitative survey found that respondents associate “being international” with being open-minded global citizens as well as with respect and tolerance for other cultures, and that they prioritize students’ attainment of internationally compatible university entrance qualifications. Kenway et al.’s (2013) qualitative study and Kanan and Baker’s (2006) quantitative survey of international schools in Hong Kong and Qatar, respectively, further underscore that respondents primarily expressed a desire to study at Anglo-American universities, with a preference for business, engineering, and media studies.

Research on state gymnasia with a specialization in the arts and with, in some cases, a tradition extending into the nineteenth century is even less favorable (cf. Ullrich, 2014, p. 186). Here, field reports and advice literature dominate (cf. Becker & Wenzel-Staudt, 2008; Hartewig, 2013). Our analysis of two high schools with a dance, music, and art profile revealed that the school administrators did not refer to current educational discourses on elite and excellence in their educational claims, but rather implicitly linked their aims to older discourses on giftedness and talent development (cf. Krüger et al., 2015, p. 205).

Additionally, quantitative overviews point to the precarious labor market situation for professions in the cultural sector (cf. Deutscher Kulturrat, 2014). Quantitative overviews of the precarious labor market situation for professions in the cultural sector have further substantiated such findings (cf. Deutscher Kulturrat, 2014). Moreover, two qualitative studies have analyzed artists’ career biographies (cf. Röbke, 2000; Schüngel, 1996) and one national and two international qualitative studies have examined dancers’ career biographies (cf. Jeffri & Throsby, 2004; Pfaff, 2017; Roncaglia, 2010). The latter studies do not, however, refer to dancers’ school career paths and subsequent transitions into study or work, but focus instead on the course and end of their professional dance careers and the concomitant compulsion to reorient their professional lives.

By contrast, the 43 elite sports schools in Germany, which have been gradually established since the 1990s as successor organizations to the children’s and youth sports schools of the former German Democratic Republic, have been studied more comprehensively. These schools offer athletic training conditions and school-based support measures to enable learners to simultaneously achieve top athletic performance and school success and thus aim for a dual career (DOSB, 2017). In this regard, two qualitative studies have dealt with the structures of network systems of youth sports development from a systems theory perspective (cf. Borggrefe & Cachay, 2014) and the school cultures of three elite sports schools from the perspective of cultural theory (cf. Pallesen, 2014). The present longitudinal study found that the school principal implicitly adhered to a functional understanding of the term “elite” and related it to the top athletic performance that schools must always achieved in order to secure the label of “elite school of sport” in the German Olympic Sports Confederation’s regular evaluations (cf. Krüger et al., 2015, p. 204).

In addition to organizational theory studies, there are a few quantitative studies that look at individual cadre careers from an efficiency-oriented perspective. For example, Güllich and Emrich’s (2012) study on competitive sports careers in seven Olympic sports and in national junior soccer programs point to the high turnover rates in these cadre systems, as athletes are replaced at a rate of 40 percent annually (see also Güllich, 2014). Longitudinal studies also find evidence of similar turnover rates in elite sports students’ participation in such cadre systems, regardless of gender (see, for example, Baron-Thieme, 2014). Based on a quantitative retrospective survey of Olympic athletes, Emrich et al. (2008) also show that elite sports students do not differ from other students in terms of their level of athletic success and their school-leaving qualifications. They are, however, less likely to go to university and are more likely to pursue careers in the German federal police or armed forces.

In two older qualitative longitudinal studies, Richartz (2000) and Bona (2001) analyze the athletic and academic career paths of students at three Berlin sports schools based on a stress-theory framework. This study finds phases of particularly high stress at the transition to eleventh grade and in the period before the Abitur. It also depicts that parents and peers from the local community, rather than coaches or sports officials, offer important instances of social support in the realization or abandonment of a dual career. What is lacking, however, are current qualitative longitudinal studies that look at the athletic and educational career paths of young people who attend elite sport schools, not only during their school years but also after their transitions to university and professional sports.

Theoretical Frames of Reference and Design of the Longitudinal Study

It is precisely these research deficits that this study addresses. In addition to the above-described analysis of institutional educational aspirations (see also Krüger et al., 2015), the qualitative longitudinal study also investigated the academic and profile-related career paths of adolescents at these schools from tenth through twelfth grade until 2 years after their transition to post-secondary education or to employment.

In the analysis of the longer-term careers of these adolescents or young adults (age 16-ca. 21), social constructivist and praxeological approaches form the theoretical frames of reference. In accordance with social constructivist concepts of youth research (cf. Krüger & Grunert, 2021), adolescents and young adults are understood as active shapers of their environment who co-construct their educational biographies. In this context, they are confronted with specific biographical challenges in their adolescent life phase, which, as current transition research rightly points out (cf. Wanka et al., 2020, p. 16; Stauber, 2021), not only concern decision-making and processes of shaping institutional transitions from school to university or work. Instead, in adolescence and young adulthood, biographical transitions such as separation from family or the search for new friends must be mastered and shaped at the same time. In order to analytically understand the integration of the biographical trajectories and individual orientations of adolescents and young adults in milieu-specific experiences, the longitudinal study draws on praxeological theoretical approaches, particularly that developed Bohnsack (2017) in a micro-sociological reinterpretation of Bourdieu’s theory of culture (cf. Bourdieu, 1993). In contrast to Bourdieu, who locates the genesis of an individual and collective habitus in the context of macrosocial conditions such as different capital configurations, Bohnsack’s concept attempts to uncover the formation of habitual orientations in different milieu-specific stratifications. Accordingly, the longitudinal study focused on social interactions in schools and universities, in the family, and in peer worlds.

Methodologically, the longitudinal study primarily employed a qualitative approach. This was preceded by a quantitative survey of students in the tenth grade in order to select a contrasting sample of 17 students at the international school and 25 adolescents with a dual career (12 in sports, 5 in dance, 2 in music, 6 in art) for biographical-narrative interviews in the study’s first phase, who were then each interviewed again when they were in the twelfth grade and 2 years after they had graduated. Of the students at the international school, 10 out of 17 young people participated in all three surveys and of the young people with a dual career, 20 out of 25 young people participated in all three surveys (cf. Krüger, 2019, p. 12). To analyze the interviews, we drew on the documentary method (cf. Bohnsack et al., 2010; Nohl, 2006), and further developed it for a longitudinal perspective, which requires remaining longer at the level of individual case reconstruction when analyzing the continuity or change in the young people’s individual orientations from the beginning of high school to 2 years after graduation before case-contrastive analyses are subsequently completed for each case (cf. Leinhos et al., 2019).

Educational Biographical Pathways in the Interplay Between Family, School and Peers

The following section explores whether and how adolescents from IB schools and high schools with an arts or athletic focus realize an exclusive educational career or a high-achievement dual career. In this context, I am interested in which socialization instances or experiential spaces interact and how they influence young people’s biographical pathways.

Separated according to transnational educational careers and profile-related careers, I present two cases for each grouping, which were selected according to field-specific career criteria, with each representing maximum contrasts. The two students from the International School differ in terms of their own conception of “world citizen” and, above all, in terms of their transnational educational careers’ different trajectories. For the profile-related career grouping, I have selected two cases that differ significantly in regard to the students’ professional careers. Following the individual case studies, I will return to the entire subsample of the longitudinal analysis and make some generalizations about the spectrum of the students’ biographical pathways and the contextual conditions of transnational educational careers and profile-related careers more generally.

Young Adults with International Educational Careers

My first case refers to Gwyn 1), who lived in Germany from the age of six until he began his post-secondary studies. He has attended an IB School continuously since his primary school years. His parents are from Southern Europe and his family is part of a culturally diverse social network both there as well as in Germany. His father is a professor in the field of natural sciences while his mother studied economics and was unemployed at the time of the survey. The investment in an expensive, “internationally” oriented school and university education for their son can be interpretated as his parent’s desire to offer him the possibility for a transnationally oriented future anchored in their familial experiences of transnational mobility.

In the first two surveys, Gwyn identified with the school-institutional codes of cosmopolitanism and lifelong learning. He integrated curricular-based social engagement into his frame of orientation between learning opportunities and social integration. He was part of a culturally diverse school space, engaged in school-based service-learning projects in Africa, and identified with a tolerant cosmopolitanism that critically reflected on its own privileges. This was later documented in his studies as well as his intercultural university involvement.

Regarding education and learning, Gwyn’s orientation toward self-directed learning of new things and the comprehensive and creative acquisition of knowledge and world understanding was continually and dynamically reiterated across all three surveys. Already in the tenth grade, Gwyn was not only one of the top scholastic performers at his school, but his educational orientation also went far beyond school learning, for example, writing poetry or composing music in his free time. Gwyn continued his orientation toward a comprehensive acquisition of the world in the 12th grade as well as currently in his BA studies at a renowned college in the U.S. where he is taking courses in sociology and anthropology in addition to his linguistics degree program and pre-medical studies because he plans to study psychiatry afterwards.

I have developed an interest in psychiatry because somehow I am interested in the brain, it was through linguistics that I asked myself how does language come about at all? What happens in the head? … and if you want to study psychiatry here, you must first complete a medical degree and then decide to specialize in psychiatry (Interview 3).

Gwyn’s self-determined choice of subject and place of study was at the same time accompanied by massive conflicts with his father, which were already evident in the study’s first phase. His father had long wanted him to study science instead of linguistics. Because of these conflicts, Gwyn’s father initially did not want to finance his studies. It was only after his mother intervened and the university promised a financial grant that he accepted Gwyn’s degree choice. Additionally, Gwyn hopes that once he completes his Doctor of Medicine after his bachelor’s degree at an elite American university, he will better fulfill his father’s ambitious aspirations, and thus ‘make him happier’ and receive greater recognition from him.

In contrast to Gwyn’s mother, who provided her son with emotional and practical support in choosing his intended field of study and university location, peers played no role in his transition or his decision-making, as Gwyn was an outsider at school and had only a few loose friendships. It was not until the beginning of his post-secondary studies that he successfully established closer peer relationships, especially one with an American student, which offered emotional and professional support to Gwyn during his studies. His student advisor at the International School was far more important for his process of choosing a course of study.

I applied to different universities in the United States //hm hm// and um we have in the school um there was a man who helped us sort of as an advisor who told us fill out forms like this and then he recommended different universities in different countries to us and um he recommended the United States to me (Interview 3)

Accordingly, Gwyn followed the recommendations of the counselor hired specifically for this purpose at the International School and, quite naturally, looked primarily at exclusive universities in the United States when choosing where he would study.

The maximum contrast to Gwyn’s hitherto successful international educational career is certainly that of Anton. Although we were only able to interview him during the first two waves, his case highlights the importance of the family dimension and the limits of schooling. In contrast to Gwyn, Anton’s school biography is characterized by his father’s—who is an American citizen—frequent career changes, his parent’s separation, and multiple international relocations (Germany, USA, Austria, USA, Germany). After his return from the United States with his mother, he entered the tenth grade at an international school at the age of 17. Because of his lack of German language skills, this was the only way he could participate in the German education system. Anton identified very strongly with the institutional educational claim of world citizenship and socialized with those who were also subject to their parents’ mobility. Although the international school’s support function was central for him, he had to leave the school after just a year because his mother’s friend stopped paying his school fees (cf. Keßler et al., 2015, p. 120). With this loss of support, he was hardly able to enact his ambitious orientations towards learning something new, and, against the background of his constantly changing location and schools, his peers offer no significant stability for him. Its emotional and content-related support notwithstanding, the international school was unable to act as a long-term cushion or even as a springboard for an exclusive educational career as Anton currently experiences great difficulty in obtaining a school-leaving certificate at all at the international private school he is now attends in another large city.

In the context of the subsample of the international students who participated in the study, Anton’s case is an exception. Of the ten young people whose educational biographies that were followed from the 10th grade to 2 years after their graduation, nine are now studying at international universities, most of them renowned and primarily in the Anglo-American region. Like Kanan and Baker’s (2006) findings, they have chosen to study subjects such as engineering, medicine, politics, sociology, or media studies. In terms of subject choice, it is apparent that young men tend to prefer subjects in the technical and scientific fields, while young women appear to prefer creative or social subjects (cf. Jörke & Lenz, 2017, p.148). In their university studies, too, most of the young adults we studied were financially supported by their parents. Peers tended to be less significant in their university selection. During their studies, however, their mostly newly made friends represent an important support community in dealing with questions of content or emotionally tense moments in the context of the young people’s transnational study biography.

Young Adults with Dual Careers

In the following, I focus on those young adults who have pursued or are pursuing dual careers in dance, sports, art, or music. Julian represents an example of a successful dual career, as he was able to obtain both a place at his desired dance academy and quickly obtained employment with a dance company. He lived with his parents in a village and moved to a big city in the 11th grade to attend a high school with a focus on dance. His father is an engineer, his mother is a secretary. Dance has been anchored in Julian’s biography since his early childhood: “I was always a dancer” (Interview 1). In the 10th grade, he transferred from his rural school to one with a focus on dance.

After graduating from school, Julian studied at a dance academy in a major German city. As early as mid-2016, he decided to accept a job offer as a dancer in a company and thus began his professional life as a dancer. With this decision, he was able to put his orientation towards personal and professional development in dance, which was continuously documented over the course of the longitudinal study, into practice. At the same time, he maintained his strong educational and academic orientation towards success. This was documented in the study’s third phase, for example, in the fact that he still expressed his desire to complete his BA although he had already transitioned out of school into a dance company. Julian is also integrated in a group of dancers at the university and continues to be close friends with Freya, a fellow dancer. Throughout all three study waves, he enacted his second central orientation, social inclusion, but this, however, became repeatedly fragile during transitions, especially when he transitioned to the dance-focused high school and when he entered university. The reason for this lies in the tension he experienced between his increasing pursuit of professionalization in dance and his search for social embeddedness, which was particularly evident in the third interview:

but in the end, I am also the soloist and I dance the most //mh// and then when I complain about something then it’s Julian you have nothing to complain about, you have the solo […] and since that I can’t fall back on anyone else, I don’t have any friends around me (Interview 3).

Over the course of his studies, Julian was repeatedly selected for solos and had been given various opportunities to work with choreographers who helped him develop his skills.

Julian negotiated his decision to study dance at a dance academy as a given: he applied while he was still in the preparatory phase for his Abitur. In so doing, he very consciously looked for a profile that fit his orientation, which was decisively shaped by the high school he had attended and the dance training it offered. After he was accepted by three universities in Germany and abroad, his decision to choose a particular university was closely linked to his central orientations and he selected a university in a large city in central Germany because its educational program corresponded exactly with his interests in personal development and social inclusion:

As I saw the big city, saw this school, saw this dimension, I said (.), here, here is where the competition happens that I need (.) because there are simply more people here from whom I can profit (.) and […] the balance was simply good between //hm-hm// between here its own, here is where things are going on (.)//hm-hm// but I am also (.) secure her’ (Interview 3).

Across all three waves, Julian’s family played an emotionally supportive and grounding as well as relaxing role. Similar to his family, his peers have an emotionally supportive and, moreover, professionally supportive significance, even though, over the course of the three study waves and against the background of his increasing professionalization, his relationships became less related to groups and more to friendship dyads. His high school and its dance focus which combined modern and classical dance are significant for Julian’s dance orientation and his chosen university.

Athlete Philipp, who has been attending an elite sports school since he was in the 5th grade, represents a maximum contrast to Julian. Phillip had been pursuing a professional athletics career since his childhood and exhibited both a strong performance and success orientation and high-level professional ambitions already in the first wave in the 10th grade. By the second wave, his performance orientation had been unsettled by his lack of athletic success. Additionally, across all three waves, no peer relationships supported him in his career pursuits. Instead, his relationships with predominantly male friends in the town soccer club or in the gym represented an action- and fun-oriented parallel to the world of competitive sports for him.

Across all three waves, his academic orientations also contrasted his high-performance athletic orientation, as he only strived to achieve the required high school diploma or, later, a college degree in electrical engineering at a technical college. In the third wave, a massive conflict emerged between him and his national coach over his non-inclusion on the relay team at the German championships, which catalyzed a biographical crisis and led him to abandon his athletics career. Moreover, Phillip has strong regional roots and had little ambition to become nationally mobile for his athletic career. Across all three waves, Philipp’s parents offered support for his athletics career ambitions, but they were also nonetheless unable to prevent his career from coming to an end. Philipp identified with the concept “elite” as a sporting elite, which is also anchored in the label of the school he attended, but only for as long as he was involved in the world of high-performance sport. With the end of competitive sports, however, he began to critically distance himself from this concept.

Looking at the entire subsample of young people with dual careers in dance, sports, arts, and music studied over the course of the six-year longitudinal study, of the 20 adolescents or young adults who participated in all three waves of the survey, a total of only five (including Julian) continued their professional careers after graduating; 15, on the other hand, discontinued their profile-related careers during this period and now pursue their dance, sports, art or music interests recreationally. This confirms other studies’ findings (see, for example, Güllich, 2014) regarding the high turnover rates and dropout rates in the field of dual careers. Thus, a dual career is only successful if an individual has a strong biographical fixation on the profile-related career and if the career is also compatible with other central—for example, academic—orientations and when significant others, such as parents, peers, teachers or trainers, play a supporting role.

Profile Schools as Springboards for an Exclusive Educational or Profile Career?

The answer to the question formulated in the introduction about the interplay between different experiential spaces within students’ educational biography and schools’ significance for their transnational study career or profile-related career in the fields of dance, sport, music or art turns out to be rather ambiguous. The infrastructure at the IB school as well as the three high schools with a dance-music, artistic, or sports profile, with their specific additional personnel in the form of study advisors or coaches or lecturers from neighboring universities as well as their curricular focus, offer students good starting points for the transition into an international university or an artistic or sports career. How these career paths actually take shape, however, depends crucially on the interplay between these institutional services and the now young adults’ biographical orientations and their integration into differentiated spaces of experience. How significant others support them as they pursue their career paths is also rather important.

The family experience with its respective milieu-specific embedding is a central influencing factor. Thus, with the exception of Anton, all of the young people from the studied international school, who come from economically privileged transnationally mobile families or, more recently, increasingly from well-to-do German families, receive significant support from their parents, not only professionally and emotionally but also, above all, financially, in realizing their school education and pursuing their post-secondary studies at mostly renowned international universities. The young people who were pursuing dual high-achievement careers, most of whom come from academic families (cf. also Faure & Suaud, 2009), received extensive advice from their parents in making their career decisions to date, in choosing their profile school, and in searching for a suitable university program along with associated changes.

Additionally, significant others also play a role outside the family, such as the study advisors at the international school who offer students advice on various studying abroad options or the motivating dance company leaders and sports coaches who can play a decisive role in whether the young people continue or—as Philipp’s case shows—abandon their high-performance athletic careers. In addition, a lacking sense of achievement, injuries, motivational problems, and associated biographical crises or even precarious employment opportunities on the labor market for cultural professions or in some segments of competitive sports led many of the young people we studied to abandon their profile-related high-performance careers after, at the latest, they graduated from school (cf. Baron-Thieme, 2014; Bona, 2001; Deutscher Kulturrat, 2014; Güllich, 2014).

Compared to the socializing factors already mentioned, peers tended to play a lesser role in the formation of a transnational educational career or a dual high-performance career. The IB students’ high level of global mobility, the high training loads in terms of time, for example, in the areas of sports and dance, and, most importantly, the transition from school to university studies or associated changes in clubs or troupe further intensified the fluidity of peer relationships. Nonetheless, the studied international school students manage to form new mostly dyadic friendship relationships after their transition from high school to university. Such friendships function as intellectual exchange and emotional support communities, which also allow international educated elites to work through issues of privileged identity together (Howard et al., 2014). The studied adolescents who continue to pursue a high-performance career in dance or soccer after high-school graduation remain involved in partly new peer networks from their training groups’ social environments, which offer significant support for their careers (cf. also Borchert, 2013). By contrast, for young people who drop out of their dual careers, peers tend to have the character of a parallel world to their respective career area, in which relaxation and fun-oriented activities take center stage.

The graduates’ biographical references to and constructions of elite notions show interesting similarities and differences. The high-performance athletes continue to refer positively to a functional understanding of elite sport performance, which is also manifested in the school program, as long as they themselves move into the world of top-level sports. The alumni of the high schools for the arts, on the other hand, are characterized by individually different and less contoured understandings of being elite, which also corresponds to the longitudinal study’s empirical findings that the two studied schools’ less clear institutional references to elite concepts (cf. Krüger et al., 2015, p. 205). All alumni of the international school deal critically with a concept of elite and its association with social origin and economic capital and the accusation that they attended a “Bonzenschule” (a bigshot school). In their argumentation, they counter this with the idea of a responsible elite that values its own privileges. In their communicative knowledge and their biographical self-image, they thus refer to the myth of their former schools’ tolerant cosmopolitanism. On the level of their factual educational trajectories, however, their exclusive international university careers turn out to be pathways for social status reproduction for the old and, above all, new transnationally mobile academic upper and middle classes (cf. Reckwitz, 2019, p. 92).

Finally, if we relate the empirical findings presented to the basic assumptions and findings of current reflexive transition research (cf. Wanka et al., 2020), two aspects in particular should be noted. First, in the case reconstructions it became clear that institutional modes of doing transition from school to college or work are always embedded in complex biographical transitions and contexts even in this exclusive segment of the educational system (cf. also Stauber, 2021). For example, the self-determined choice of study program and international university can further exacerbate already existing family detachment conflicts or the transition to a professional career in dance or sports in these highly competitive fields can lead to a loss of friendships and the need to build new peer networks. Second, the empirical findings show that institutional and biographical transitions, even in the field of exclusive education, can only be comprehensively understood if the interplay between institutional demands, regulations, and enabling spaces and subjective shaping and coping processes, as well as their milieu-specific anchoring, is considered in a multidimensional perspective (cf. Wanka et al., 2020, p. 23).

Note

  1. 1.

    The cases presented in this chapter are based on the results of the analysis of biographical interviews, which were collected within the framework of the DFG-project, “Exclusive Educational Careers and the Significance of Peer Cultures”. For reasons of data protection, all names, locations and/or parents’ occupations were anonymized.