Choosing where to educate one’s children is an important and complex decision. It often takes into account a child’s strengths and ambitions, the family’s educational history, priorities around staying local or going abroad, et cetera. For wealthy German families, these questions are particularly complex. There is no one educational path that those families follow but rather a variety of options that include public schools, progressive schools, international schools, and boarding schools to name just a few. This project maps why such families make certain educational decisions, and how this impacts their families, their businesses and German society at large.

This project runs through September 2028.

In collaboration with Daria Tisch and Charlotte de Alwis, this project speaks to the body of literature linking prestigious educational institutions to wealth re/production. We examine the prevalence amongst American billionaires of having attended an Ivy League university by quantitatively analyzing the Forbes World’s Billionaires list from 2010 to 2023. We investigate how Ivy League attendance relates to gender, origin of wealth (‘self-made’ versus inherited fortunes), and personal level of wealth; and how this changes over time.

Publications under review.

Conducting follow-up interviews with young people that I studied for my dissertation, and focusing on those from emerging markets – in particular, Russia, China and Iran – Claire Maxwell and I explored their experiences of global mobility post-schooling. Although the extant literature argues that mobility is a strategy employed by elite groups to maintain and reproduce their wealth, we found that these young people’s privileges are not necessarily transferable across borders. Instead, we learned that the realities of gender, race and geopolitics have come to bear on their opportunities, ambitions and envisioned futures.

Publications:

1. Maxwell, C., & Lillie, K. (2024). From a National Elite to the Global Elite: Possibilities and Problems in Scaling Up. The British Journal of Sociology, 75(5), 938-945.

   Doi:10.1111/1468-4446.13129

2. Lillie, K. & Maxwell, C. (2024). Who are the global super-rich of tomorrow? We interviewed teens at one of the world’s most expensive schools to find out. The Conversation, published online August 28.

   https://theconversation.com/who-are-the-global-super-rich-of-tomorrow-we-interviewed-teens-at-one-of-the-worlds-most-expensive-schools-to-find-out-235737

   Read over 125,000 times.

I completed my doctorate, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), at University College London (UCL) in 2020. My thesis was a sociological and historical case study of transnational elite class formation at a boarding school in Switzerland. I gathered data over a period of 15 months by interviewing administrators and students; making observations; and analysing archival documents. My analysis critically engaged theory around global flows of power and the transnational space to argue that economically elite young people at this site were not becoming ‘citizens of the world’, as the school professed, but rather national citizens in a world economy. The thesis made empirically based contributions to social theory by critically investigating class formation processes in a different kind of elite school space than that represented in the extant literature, thereby moving our conceptual frameworks forward.

Publications:

1. Lillie, K. (2024). Geographies of Wealth: The Materiality of an Elite School in Switzerland. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 45(3), 382–395.

   Doi:10.1080/01596306.2024.2335005

2. Lillie, K., & Maxwell, C. (2024). Practices of Consumption: Cohesion and Distinction within a Globally Wealthy Group. Sociology, 58(3), 682-698.

   Doi:10.1177/00380385231206070

3. Lillie, K. (2022). Adaptations to Global Changes: Strategic Evolutions of an Elite School, 1961-2011. History of Education, 51(2), 286-303.

   Doi:10.1080/0046760X.2021.2002433

4. Lillie, K. (2021). Multi-Sited Understandings: Complicating the Role of Elite Schools in Transnational Class Formation. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 42(1), 82-96.

   Doi:10.1080/01425692.2020.1847633

5. Lillie, K. (2021). Mobile and Elite: Diaspora as a Strategy for Status Maintenance in Transitions to Higher Education. British Journal of Educational Studies, 69(5), 641-656.

   Doi:10.1080/00071005.2021.1948965

6. Lillie, K. & Ayling, P. (2021). Revisiting the Un/ethical: The Complex Ethics of Elite Studies Research. Qualitative Research, 21(6), 890-905.

   Doi:10.1177/1468794120965361