Narratives of Worth in a Politically Fractured Higher Education Field

• In Event: Sociology of Education Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 23. Stratification Processes in Higher Education

Abstract

What happens when a political movement simultaneously expands access to higher education and attacks the cultural legitimacy of the institutions that have historically defined academic success? Between 2005 and 2023, Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) quadrupled the country's universities from 53 to 207 while waging a sustained campaign against elite educational institutions, curtailing university autonomy, persecuting critical academics, and framing these institutions as alien to national values. This paper argues that such politically driven transformations produce competing meritocratic frameworks that are lived and narrated differently depending on students' class positions. Drawing on over sixty life-story interviews and ethnographic fieldwork at two Istanbul universities—an elite, globally-oriented institution (RU) representing cosmopolitan meritocracy and a recently-established university (NU) embodying the AKP's populist meritocratic project—I examine how students construct life stories that draw on competing, class-rooted collective narratives of merit, achievement, and worth. Findings reveal that neither group experiences the system as meritocratic, but for class-specific reasons. RU students, products of cosmopolitan meritocracy, encounter an eroding economy and a political assault on their institution's cultural authority; they long for a meritocratic order organized around "school smarts" that no longer delivers. NU students, the ostensible beneficiaries of populist expansion, recognize their structural disadvantage and relate ambivalently to the state's vision of the pious, nationally conscious citizen they are expected to embody, constructing alternative claims to worth grounded in "life smarts"—practical competence, resilience, and experiential knowledge. These divergent narratives demonstrate that political contestation over education reshapes not just access and opportunity but the subjective meaning of credentials themselves.

Author

• Aras Koksal, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities