International Studies in Sociology of Education

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Deservedness, humbleness and chance:

conceptualisations of luck and academic success
among Singaporean elite students

Rebecca Ye & Erik Nylander

To cite this article: Rebecca Ye & Erik Nylander (2020): Deservedness, humbleness and chance:
conceptualisations of luck and academic success among Singaporean elite students, International
Studies in Sociology of Education, DOI: 10.1080/09620214.2020.1789491

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09620214.2020.1789491

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INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION
https://doi.org/10.1080/09620214.2020.1789491

ARTICLE

Deservedness, humbleness and chance:

conceptualisations of luck and academic success among
Singaporean elite students
a b,c
Rebecca Ye and Erik Nylander
a
Department of Education, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden; bNanyang Technological
University, Singapore; cDepartment of Behavioural Sciences and Learning, Linköping University,
Linköping, Sweden

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

In this article, we examine conceptualisations of luck evoked by Received 2 March 2020
a select group of elite students studying in Oxbridge, when Accepted 23 June 2020
accounting for their academic success. The emphasis on luck in KEYWORDS
their narratives is categorised into three themes. The students Elites; luck; Oxbridge;
linked their luckiness to deservedness, used luck as a way to Singapore; success
express humbleness, and attributed their success to factors of
chance. These themes are analysed against the backdrop of
strong institutional support they receive as part of attending
elite schools and being scholarship recipients. By being attentive
to how luck is evoked in these narratives, we show that luck does
not have an essential meaning and can produce different repre­
sentations of legitimacy. The paper proposes the integration
between critical and pragmatic sociological perspectives in
order to advance our understandings of how elite groups qualify
for the positions they obtain, how they define themselves and
make sense of their educational merits.

Introduction
The sociological interest for researching elite education has grown in recent
decades, a period marked by widening inequality across many developed
countries (Karabel, 2006; Khan, 2012; van Zanten, 2018). Previous research
has illustrated how elite students tend to emphasise their own merits and
virtues as attributes for academic success (Brown et al., 2016; Power et al.,
2016). Conversely, upwardly mobile students are more likely to attribute
their movement in space to chance, luck and serendipitous forces (Atkins,
2017; Reay et al., 2009). How then should we understand the narratives of
those who are embedded in elite, resource-rich institutions, when they link
their successes to factors of luck? Furthermore, how should these claims of
luck be understood in societies where the meritocratic discourse of effort,
hard work and achievement is a valued and dominant ideal?

CONTACT Rebecca Ye rebecca.ye@edu.su.se

© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduc­
tion in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
2 R. YE AND E. NYLANDER

This study integrates pragmatic and critical sociological perspectives

(Boltanski, 2011) in order to scrutinize how the notion of luck is evoked
by Singaporean students engaged in obtaining undergraduate degrees at the
Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The students represent an extremely
select group who have undergone high-stakes admission and selection
procedures before embarking on state-sponsored higher education sojourns
abroad. Their accounts of how they have attained success is fascinating to
examine in greater detail as these students are destined for eventual leader­
ship roles within the public service, and bear witness to the ethos among
those at the very top of the Singaporean education system.
We will begin by mapping out earlier social scientific research that has
explored the phenomenon of luck and educational luckiness. The review is
then followed by a description of the theoretical and methodological fram­
ing of our research case, leading forward to our findings. Our findings
illustrate how luck is evoked in three different ways amongst the elite
students: (i) luck as deservedness, (ii) luck as an expression of humbleness;
and (iii) luck as a form of random event or chance. In discussing these
findings, we analyse the emphasis on luck against the backdrop of the
meritocratic ideal that is embraced in Singapore. Finally, we discuss these
findings in relation to sociological theory and emphasize how easy it is to
overstate the role of luck or, conversely, undermine its role in elite
trajectories.

Researching luck

Even if all families were basically identical, incomes would be unequally distributed
because of the unequal incidence of endowment and market luck. The income
inequality in any generation depends, of course, on the inequality of luck in that
generation, but also in a decisive way on the luck in previous generations. Since lucky
parents invest more in their children, the increase in the children’s incomes would
induce them to invest more in their own children in the succeeding generation, and so
on until all descendants benefit from the initial luck. (Becker, 1993, p. 203)

In one of his essays in A Treatise on the Family, Gary Becker hypothesizes

that inequality in outcomes of any generation depends on the inequality of
luck in that generation. Luck, according to Becker, is endowed. Popularly
known as the father of human capital theory, Becker is not alone in viewing
luck as a force that shapes talent, educational success and life trajectories.
Within contemporary economic theory such as behavioural economics, luck
and chance tend to be emphasised as a factor in explaining success in
markets. For instance, Frank (2016), takes issue with human capital theory
and its myth of meritocracy, arguing that the theory underestimates the role
of luck and chance in promoting success and propelling widening income
 INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION 3

inequality. In particular, the emergence of winner-take-all markets, he

argues, magnifies the role of luck.
Regardless of how different these strands of economic theories may be,
they converge in drawing a link between luck and success. To spar with
these economists, one could draw from Bourdieu’s writings on misrecogni­
tion (Bourdieu, 1996). While Bourdieu has not written specifically on luck,
he has written extensively on the propensity to misrecognise material
privileges, contacts and assets, that is, the (conscious or unconscious) lack
of acknowledgement of different kinds of social determinants. Social actors
tend to gravitate towards taking the world for granted and accepting the
world as it is, since our minds and cognitive structures are formed in
accordance with our positions within the objective structures of the world
(Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 168).
From a Bourdieusian perspective, the economists’ strong emphasis of the
role luck plays for success and educational achievement can be viewed as
a rendering of misrecognition. The unexplained effects observed and attrib­
uted to luck are placed in a black box that remains largely unexplored. For
example, as noted above, Becker acknowledges that ‘lucky parents invest
more in their children’, although such ‘investment’ seems to originate from
a primordial source of universally accessible luck. Bourdieu’s work, by
contrast, illustrates how opportunities and subjective expectations tend to
be shaped by an objective set of possibilities, which differ greatly from one
another depending on inherited and acquired forms of capital. As actors
veer towards circumstances and social fields that best match their disposi­
tions and, conversely, avoid environments which make them uncomfortable
due to a field-habitus clash, situations of radical uncertainty tend to be
effectively and collectively avoided (Bourdieu, 1990). This propensity is
particularly prevalent in the realm of education where the idea of giftedness
masks the enabling forces of privilege (Bourdieu, 1996, pp. 19–20). The
element of luck and uncertainty in educational outcomes is also reduced by
laws, standards and other institutionalized forms of governing that makes
the world more predictable.
On the other hand, Bourdieu’s critical sociology has been questioned
based on the idea that it disregards the element of uncertainty inscribed in
the social order (Boltanski, 2011, p. 18ff). Within post-Bourdieusian sociol­
ogy, one key focus has been the study of situations where uncertainty
prevails and actors cannot assign a probability to the outcome of their
actions, nor take its underlying value principles for granted. This has
brought about a renewed interest in the process of justification among
actors facing an unknowable future (Biggart & Beamish, 2003, p. 456).
Selective institutions, such as elite schools, are pertinent social settings to
explore questions of luck, as they are generally characterized by scarcity in
available positions and are often deemed inaccessible by the masses. Within
4 R. YE AND E. NYLANDER

pragmatic sociology there has been an emphasis in examining institutions as

they are equipped with the semantic power to stabilise and fixate reality by
confirming ‘what is the case’ and ‘what matters’ (Boltanski, 2011, p. 75).

Educational luckiness
Beyond the concept of luck found in economic and sociological literature,
there have been studies discussing the notion of ‘luck’ within education
trajectories, although often limited to those who experience upward mobi­
lity. Earlier studies have argued that young people in middle- and upper
classes perceived their attainment of a higher level of education as an
achievement, while the lower classes attributed their successful attainment
to factors like luck (Hyman, 1966; Boudon, 1974). Reay et al. (2009,
p. 1108) similarly found that working-class students in a British elite
university attributed their university choice process more to ‘clueless
serendipity’ than determined ambition, while Atkins (2017) argues, from
her research on vocational education participants, that serendipity is of
greater significance for those whose habitus is more transformative than
reproductive.
Research on privileged student groups, on the other hand, tends to focus
on processes of entitlement and misrecognition in line with the critical
sociological endeavour of unravelling social determinants underneath the
surface of success. The well-documented academic achievement gap, based
on the socio-economic status of parents, has been found to be increasing in
most countries over the course of the last 50 years (Chmielewski, 2019).
Within the field of sociology of education, research consistently highlights
the role families play in cultivating disparity in academic achievement. For
instance, van Zanten (2015) highlights the importance of ‘subtle strategies’
amongst French upper- and middle-class families in preserving the image of
individual student’s merit and autonomy, while perpetuating inequality by
concealing the extent of control parents exert over their children’s educa­
tional and career trajectories. In a comparative study by Brown and collea­
gues of graduates from elite universities in the UK and France, references
made to ‘being lucky’ next to more conventional explanations such as
highlighting their ‘hard work’, ability to ‘seize opportunities’, ‘passion to
succeed’ and ‘strength of character’ were frequent amongst interviewees
(Brown et al., 2016, pp. 200–207). Ultimately, the students interviewed
believe that it was hard work and determination that offered them their
positional advantage in the labour market.
Although not focused specifically on students’ narratives of luck and
success, there have been two previous studies that touch on social class
and luck in Singapore. In a 2001 survey of a national representative sample,
Tan (2004) found that while the majority of Singaporeans were more likely
 INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION 5

to attribute success to ability and education, both the upper and lower
classes orientated more towards ‘luck’ as a success factor. Two decades
earlier, a study on occupational prestige found that those in high prestige
occupations (as compared to those in low prestige) were more inclined to
view luck as an important ingredient for success (Quah et al., 1991). These
puzzling results, that were inconsistent with earlier notions of Asian fatalism
and the self-directed elite, were interpreted by the authors as having to do
with the ‘realistic’ view of success that was cultivated by the ones that
‘struggled’ to top occupations. In contrast, those in low prestige occupations
might have a greater tendency to place their trust in the ‘social system of
rewards that promises success for hard work’ (Quah et al., 1991, p. 101).
However, the authors emphasised the need for more research in order to
offer adequate interpretations of how luck is viewed in the context of high
prestige groups in Singapore.
In contrast to the earlier educational research on conceptions of luck
found amongst the parvenu, this study focuses on the notion of luck among
a group of Singaporean elite students studying at Oxbridge. While it might
come as no surprise that newcomers to elite institutions in education often
evoke serendipitous reasons for explaining their study trajectories, the
Singaporean student group at Oxbridge partakes in a well-trodden trajec­
tory based on firm institutional linkages between Singapore and the UK (Ye
& Nylander, 2015). In the sections to follow, we will outline the research
case and approach, map out how the narratives of the students could be
understood in relation to their embeddedness in rich institutional support
and positions of privilege, before we examine how these students evoke the
concept of luck as a means to justify their educational careers.

Research case and approach

The contradictions of the ideals of meritocracy have been vividly debated, in
Singapore as well as elsewhere (Tan, 2008, 2010; Teo, 2018). The
Singaporean type of meritocracy has been shown to incorporate both ‘elitist
and egalitarian aspirations’ and as Lim (2016) argued, education policies
have historically wavered between these opposing dimensions. Despite the
instability of the meritocratic concept, belief in meritocracy is still persistent
in Singapore. It might be that this belief is itself conditional on the social
fabric. Studies have found that countries with widespread acceptance for
meritocracy are often characterised by relatively high-income inequality
and, paradoxically, disparity in objective life chances (Mijs, 2019; Roex
et al., 2019).
One of the cornerstones in the Singaporean meritocratic story has to do
with the selection of its governing elite within public service and politics.
From an early age, the ‘best and brightest’ pupils are selected and groomed
6 R. YE AND E. NYLANDER

through awards and coveted scholarships, which are meant to lead them to
acquire prestigious university education abroad, before returning to serve in
the public service (Ye & Nylander, 2015). Since the 1960s, the Public Service
Commission (PSC) has been awarding the most prestigious of these types of
government scholarships. The origins of the PSC in Singapore can be traced
to the White Paper, Organization of the Colonial Service, issued by the
British government in 1946, whereby recommendations were made to
establish these commissions in colonies for ensuring that their public
services would be staffed by the most qualified local candidates (Quah,
2010, p. 72).
In the case of PSC scholarships, the contractual agreement typically
administered between the Commission and the student at the point of
disbursing these awards is a five to six years bond to the public service
upon graduation. Every year, top-performing students at the GCE ‘A’ levels
and International Baccalaureate examinations are put through rigorous
selection procedures. Those who emerge victorious in these contests secure
expensive scholarship awards that allow them to undertake undergraduate
studies at home or abroad, all expenses paid, on the condition that they
continue to be high achievers in their respective disciplines and return to
work for the government. Often identified and labelled colloquially as
‘scholars’, these individuals are offered opportunities to be fast-tracked
into leadership positions within the administrative rungs of the state and
to crossover into politics later on in their career, if deemed to be of high
potential (Tan, 2008). As illustrated by Ye & Nylander (2015), transmission
of informational capital is overt through the admission procedures into elite
universities and the scholarship selection processes, and economistic policy­
making and technocratic leadership is groomed early through the types of
disciplinary training a Singaporean scholar receives.
To help contextualize our analysis, we mapped out the educational path­
ways of 1,148 Singaporean government scholars awarded between a recent
seventeen-year period (2002 to 2018) with information about their trajec­
tories such as their pre-university institution, university they will attend,
and course they will study. The information has been gathered from annual
reports made available on the homepage of the Public Service Commission
as well as the National Archives.
We find that the most popular destination for PSC government scholars
to attend university has been the United Kingdom. Furthermore, the two
most attended universities among scholars are the Universities of Oxford
and Cambridge, amounting to almost half of those who attended UK
universities (see Figure 1). The pattern of outbound student mobility thus
motivates our venture into exploring admissions into British elite univer­
sities in general, and Oxbridge in particular. Figure 2 further illustrates how
over this period, the majority of scholarship recipients came from two
 INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION 7

Figure 1. PSC scholarship recipients’ (2002–2018) country destinations for higher education
(N = 1,148). Source of data: Public Service Commission Annual Reports, figure: authors’ own.

Figure 2. Number of PSC scholarship recipients, by school, per year (2002–2018) (N = 1,148).
Source of data: Public Service Commission Annual Reports, figure: authors’ own.

particular schools: Raffles and Hwa Chong Institution. Year on year, there
are more students from these two schools awarded scholarships, as com­
pared to the number of students coming from more than 20 other pre-
university institutions combined.
Additionally, Figure 3 illustrates how an even greater majority of students
who attended Oxbridge and did so on scholarships came from these two
elite schools in Singapore. This demonstrates the transnational institutional
ties forged between elite schools in the two countries, mediated through the
disbursement of government scholarships that sponsor their mobility.
According to recent official admission data from Oxford, Singapore had
the highest success rates amongst international applicants (University of
Oxford, 2018). For Cambridge, Singaporean applicants tend to have an
above average success rate as compared to applications from other countries
8 R. YE AND E. NYLANDER

Figure 3. Percentage of PSC scholarship recipients who attended Universities of Oxford or

Cambridge, by school background (2002–2018) (N = 257). Source of data: Public Service
Commission Annual Reports, figure: authors’ own.

(University of Cambridge, 2018), with exceptionally high success rates for

students coming from Hwa Chong and Raffles (University of Cambridge,
2017). These admission statistics give rise to questions of how Singaporean
students are prepared for elite educational enrolment and relatedly, how
they account for their academic success, conceive of their educational
trajectories, and understand their positions in social space.
Although the data on the trajectories of recipients provide information
on the educational backgrounds of the scholars up till the point of them
applying to specific programmes and universities, it does not provide
information on their social class or ethnic identities which would have
been valuable to explore. Micro-level data on social class and educational
trajectories are generally scarce in Singapore. However, recent studies are
beginning to empirically reveal how elite school enrolment in Singapore
varies by key dimensions of social class. For instance, Ong and Cheung
(2016), based on a large-scale interview study of children’s aspirations, show
that students who are enrolled in elite secondary schools are more likely to
live in private housing, have at least one parent with a university degree, and
a combined household income that is above the threshold for the middle-
class majority in Singapore (SGD 10,000). Chua et al. (2019), found that
persistent differences in routes to elite schools located in wealthy neighbour­
hoods vary by attributes such as gender and ethnicity. It is therefore not
unrealistic to claim with some level of certainty that elite school enrolment
is stratified and skewed towards the upper-middle and upper classes in
 INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION 9

Singapore. The interview group that we will present next, shares similar
characteristics.

Narratives of luck: interview study

In this paper, 21 in-depth interviews with Singaporean undergraduates
studying at Oxbridge are drawn from and analysed. These interviews were
conducted in 2012, when interviewees were recruited through a variety of
methods such as contacting the agency that disburses these scholarships,
attending student events and snowballing. While all the interviewees had
applied for a PSC scholarship, 15 eventually attended university on govern­
ment scholarships, five on other types of grants, and one self-funded. The
male to female ratio was 13:8. Among them, the students had membership
to 17 different Oxbridge colleges and ranged from being first year to
final year students. In terms of disciplinary training, the subjects they
majored in included history (3), law (4), engineering and computer science
(3), natural sciences (2), with several of them (9) enrolled in interdisciplin­
ary programmes such as Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE).
All interviews were one-to-one, semi-structured, lasted between one to
two hours, and conducted in English at a location of the interviewee’s
choice in Oxford or Cambridge. The interviews were sectioned into three
parts that discussed the scholars’ past, present and future. The overall
aim of the interviews was to understand the students’ process of getting
from Singapore to Oxbridge. What shaped their aspirations? How and
why did they decide to apply to these elite universities and what did they
do in order to secure entry? The interviews were transcribed in verbatim
and NVivo was used to facilitate the coding of transcripts and data
analysis. While the project’s original purpose was not to investigate the
concept of luck, per se, the salient use of ‘luck’ in the interviewees’
narratives catalysed our interest in this issue. For this analysis, we thus
took an additional step and extracted all narratives from the transcripts
that made reference to the words ‘luck’, ‘serendipity’, ‘chance’ and being
‘fortunate’, and that were relevant in the context of discussing educa­
tional trajectories. We analysed the narratives for how luck was evoked in
each case, salience of use, and then grouped these patterns into themes.
Due to the ease in identifying these individuals, great care has been
exerted throughout the text to ensure anonymity, as well as in removing
any kind of identifying characteristics in the presentation of the empiri­
cal material.
Now that we have mapped out the institutional pathways that
Singaporean students are embedded in when pursuing elite education
abroad, we will explore how these students made sense of their admission
into Oxbridge. In accordance with methodological approaches that seek to
10 R. YE AND E. NYLANDER

combine qualitative and quantitative data, the cartographic images of

institutional attainment (provided above) are meant to situate the narra­
tive analysis to follow. Ultimately, this could be seen as an effort to
combine two ways to construct ‘the social’: one in which the world is
treated as a ‘pre-existing’ and institutionalised entity, and another in
which the world is ‘in the process of being made’ and grappled with by
social actors in situ (Boltanski, 2011). In the sections below, we unravel the
research puzzle by outlining the various ways luck is evoked in the
students’ narratives.

Findings: deservedness, humbleness and chance

Across the interviews, there was a strong salience amongst these students of
describing their education and career trajectories as characterized by a great
deal of luck. Although salience in narration should not be taken as proof for
its social significance, the frequency of luck used within this context was
striking. All except for four of the interviewees brought up luck, serendipity,
chance or being fortunate, in describing various aspects of their educational
trajectories, relating especially to admission processes and selection out­
comes. Analysing these narratives in detail, we find that there were various
ways in which the students evoked the notion of luck in their narratives, and
various levels in which they imply who got lucky: their individual selves, or
the social group they belong to. At times, they may bring up luck as a way to
express gratitude as they compete (e.g. having good teachers), other times to
refer to components of outcomes that cannot be explained (e.g. being
academically inclined). References were made to other words commonly
found in religious discourse, such as being ‘blessed’, or renderings of ‘fate’.
By analysing in detail narratives of luck from the interviews, we derived
three themes of how luck was evoked. They (i) linked their luckiness to
deservedness, (ii) used luck as a way to express humbleness; and (iii)
attributed the success in their educational trajectories to factors of chance
and luck.

Deservedness
Because of the high stakes and selectivity into elite schools, the students’
selection into Oxbridge could be seen as something unfathomable and
hence dependent on various elements of luck. Yet, in explaining their
academic accomplishments and successes, the students often acknowledged
components of planning and projection that were far from random.
Consider this reflection:
 INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION 11

I’ve been very lucky, definitely. Anybody who says otherwise is just lying. There’s no
way that you get to Cambridge or Oxford without a considerable amount of luck.
It’s very hard to say, ‘okay this guy is a lot better than this guy’. The difference
between winners and losers is hair-thin sometimes, and can be arbitrary . . . Luck is
such a big part of what happens to us. I’m damn lucky. For most of my life, I’m just
proof.

I was very lucky to get to Cambridge, and obviously I had to get the scholarship. And
so many things had to go right for me to get there. I had to get the offers, I had to get
the requisite A-levels grades, I had to get the scholarship, I had to pass the interviews,
so many things could have gone wrong. If any one of those had gone wrong, the plan
would have been derailed. (#125)

A Cambridge undergraduate held an interesting perspective of his various

educational attainments, luck, and the relation between the two. He did not
withhold his conviction of being on the lucky side. His observation of the
fine line that separates the winners from the losers and the arbitrariness of
this boundary is reminiscent of one of Bourdieu’s famous observations,
‘between the last person to pass and the first person to fail, the competitive
examination creates differences of all or nothing that can last a lifetime’
(Bourdieu, 1991, p. 120). While Bourdieu does not state this explicitly, his
observation implies that there is an element of luck for the last chosen, and
a dose of bad luck for the next in line who misses the cut.
For this student above, his experience of crossing each test on the side of
being lucky was viewed as a sequence of fortunate events, in order for him to
eventually attain the position he was at – ‘many things had to go right for
me’. What is also noteworthy is his perception that he is not the only lucky
one; others who have experienced similar successes like him are also living
‘proof’ of good luck. Saying otherwise would, according to him, even qualify
as ‘lying’. One of his counterparts, a hundred kilometres away in Oxford,
shared a similar view:
I think I’m obviously very lucky in a lot of senses. And I think a lot of people in my
shoes are very lucky in some sense as we are very lucky academically, and gifted, and
I don’t know if that is the best test of whether we should be getting the rewards as
a result of that. But, it is. And it just affected the way things work then; people
recognised that as a test. So, I think we’ve been in quite a privileged position as it is.
(#119)

This Oxford undergraduate appears to be speaking from his own perspec­

tive and collectively on behalf of those who share his ‘privileged position’.
Although he expresses some hesitation about the legitimacy of the high-
stake reward reaped by students like himself, he portrays them as lucky by
virtue of their academic inclination and ‘gifts’. Giftedness, here, is construed
as a sort of lottery that he, and talented students like him, have won. In this
way, this conception of luck is akin to that of Becker’s (1993), as cited in the
introductory section. Curiously, this student also acknowledges the
12 R. YE AND E. NYLANDER

performative power of the test itself. In a rather reflexive mode, he points

out that these tests rely on a shared recognition of these selection mechan­
isms as a kind of truth-test (Boltanski, 2011, pp. 103–104).
Similar to the findings of earlier research on elite students, the
Singaporean students oscillated in attributing their success to luck on the
one hand, and hard work or discipline on the other (Brown et al., 2016;
Power et al., 2016). For example, it was not uncommon for them to discuss
chances in relation to strategic choices they have made, or effort they have
put in to convert these opportunities into realisations, like in this extract
below:
. . . in a sense I’ve been lucky, and I’ve had sufficient discipline to bring me towards
that goal. And I think the second component would be a lot of serendipity as well?
Lots of opportunities just happen to come. It’s not like . . . sometimes you do seek
things, and they don’t come, but when you don’t seek it, it just comes. I guess there are
a lot of chances that came along for me. And I made use of it and it turned out well for
me. I guess, luck. (#124)

In this interview with a Cambridge undergraduate, his description of his

educational trajectory is assorted with luck and serendipity factors, but
importantly, how he converted these chances, with sufficient discipline,
into a successful outcome. Earlier, we referred to empirical evidence of the
historical and cumulative advantages that these students are embedded in
and which increases their probability for success. Similarly, this student’s
acknowledgement of both chances and choices reveals that his underlying
conception of success builds on an unequal distribution of objective chances
to convert luck to success.

Humbleness

Luck, in the narratives captured here, also refers to a cultural expression of

modesty, a form of self-abasement that is more closely tied to the attribute of
humility when one emerges successful in uncertain situations. At first
glance, the lucky-as-humble category stands in sharp opposition to deserv­
edness as it downplays the merits, abilities and hard work that precede elite
school admission. By playing down their expectations for successfully man­
oeuvring highly competitive applications processes, the students avoid
appearing boastful. There is also an expression of contingency and limita­
tion of personal agency, as expressed in the quote below:
I didn’t even expect to get into Oxford. I thought it was kind of a lucky thing that I got
into Oxford . . . for me it was just like let’s see what I get . . . and if all the stars are
aligned, that’s good (#113)

Through emphasising how acceptance into Oxford came as a kind of cosmic

surprise, this scholar above appears to minimise her own role in achieving
 INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION 13

success. Humbleness could also be traced back to hardship that the students
themselves experienced, obstacles they considered themselves to have over­
come despite certain disadvantages.
So, my whole family immigrated (to Singapore). Cause I have some shitty experience
in Primary School – the kids bullied me and I felt like crap. (. . .) But, I just felt like
I was quite lucky. In the sense that, given some inherent disadvantages, (my secondary
school) still let me come through (#105)

In this extract above, the student reflects on his trajectory with a sense of
gratefulness. He describes having a challenging time in the earlier stages of
his educational career. However, gaining entry into an elite secondary
school in Singapore provided him with the opportunities to progress in
successful ways. Other interviewees similarly described the enabling infra­
structural support system that facilitated their educational journeys and
careers. In particular, students interviewed from the two junior colleges
that dominated the recipient pool of PSC scholars shared about the forms
of preparation they received which primed them for entry into Oxbridge
and elaborated on the tactics and strategies devised by their schools to
improve their chances of gaining entry. The students recognised the
linkages that existed between their junior colleges in Singapore and
Oxbridge colleges as important in paving ways forward for them. In
doing so, they highlight how the limits of their agency had to do, in
part, with this institutional nexus that paved the way forward for them.
Consider this history student’s recollection about the preparation she
received during application season:
Even our choice of college was sort of determined by our (junior college) tutors in the
Humanities Programme. So, they suggested (name of college) and History. I’m very
lucky they did, because it’s really good in History (#107)

The interviewee above considers herself to be lucky for having her educa­
tional decisions influenced and shaped by advice she received from her alma
mater. Another aspect where the students exhibited gratefulness and con­
sidered themselves lucky, perhaps in the vein of filiopietistic doctrines, was
in relation to their parents’ efforts and role in preparing and grooming them
early for a competitive education system. This interview extract below
reveals elements of the relationship one of the students had with her parents
with regards to educational decisions:
I think my parents were a bit more hard-handed when I was young. So, they will tell
me, ‘you have to go to Nanyang’ – couldn’t get into RGS, so – ‘okay, go to Nanyang'.
Then I was like, ‘no I don’t want to go to a Chinese school, I can’t speak Chinese’. And
then they’re like, ‘just go, it’s the second-best school’. So okay fine, go. But as I grow
up, they let me do what I like. I think that in itself shapes that freedom to determine
your own future, to think for yourself. (#114, note: Nanyang and RGS are two elite,
female-only secondary schools)
14 R. YE AND E. NYLANDER

This student alludes to the power of parental strategies and interventions in

schooling choices and in doing so, de-emphasises individual merit and
agency. Due to the availability heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973), it is
likely that these forms of primary socialisation were harder for the students
to recall as decisive than the recent preparation they received in their junior
colleges. Because intensive parenting contradicts the ideals of the impor­
tance of youth autonomy, parents tend to develop strategies that conceal the
extent of control they exert over their children (van Zanten, 2015). In the
accounts examined, parents were typically more paternalistic during the
younger years, while ‘backing off’ as their children progressed in their
educational careers. The students can therefore acquire a sense that their
trajectories were largely shaped by their own choices, hard work and the
chances that they are lucky enough to obtain. The fallacy of forgetting the
formative role of parental involvement in preparing for successful educa­
tional trajectories might, therefore, be considered functional in order to
entertain a strong belief in one’s own independent capabilities.

Chance
Beyond deservedness and humbleness, we identified a final theme on luck
from the students’ conceptualisations of success that pertains to serendipi­
tous and chance-based circumstances. As defined in English dictionaries,
luck is both a noun (referring to a force or events that bring fortune or
adversity) and an intransitive verb (referring to one succeeding by chance).
This lexical ambiguity is apparent in the narratives of Singaporean elite
students at Oxbridge who, at times, evoked the word ‘luck’ to characterise
the privileged and chosen social group they belong to, and other times, used
it as a variable for largely unexplainable forces that have led to their current
state of educational outcomes.
From the narratives, we observed the students referencing luck in how
they considered random events and serendipitous circumstances that even­
tually led them to where they were.
I was very fortunate actually. So, in my time they still flew professors up to interview
us in Singapore (. . .) When I was interviewing for PPE, I had a professor who
specialised in History to interview me. I was quite fortunate I think because I got
a passage that I read before. So, they gave me a passage from Francis Fukuyama’s
book, The End of History (#104)

Whether imaginary or real, this student attributed his admission into

Oxford as partly relating to great fortunes that happened to him during
the application process. Not only did college representatives travel from the
UK to Singapore to conduct admission interviews but he was also handed
a canonical text that he had read before, implying that the outcome might
 INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION 15

have otherwise looked different. In another interview, the process and out­
come of application were described as even more accidental, as a student
‘happened’ to come across an information leaflet that someone had left on
the benches of the elite school he attended:
But that (applying to Oxford) only happened, because – believe it or not – the
brochure for Oxford was on one of the school benches, so (my friend and I) were
looking through, and I looked at him and (asked him), ‘do you want to participate as
well?’ (#109)

In contrast to the narratives on deservedness and humbleness, these interview

extracts highlight the role of chance and stochastic processes in intervening or
influencing their trajectories in meaningful ways. While the cultivation and
resources they receive at junior colleges, on top of the scholarships they
secure, are powerful devices in shaping their future trajectories, these students
do not take their enrolment in these elite universities for granted. Since the
educational admission into Oxbridge and other top schools are highly com­
petitive, it might not be altogether surprising that the students interviewed
point to the element of luck in their educational trajectory.
When describing their trajectories, these students are mindful of
moments that were underpinned by considerable uncertainty around the
outcomes of selection. Both in applying for a place to Oxbridge, and in
winning a prestigious government scholarship award, there are far more
applicants than places available. The principles that determine the highly
selective evaluations they have been subjected to (the system of confirma­
tion that the undergraduate at Oxford described above as a ‘recognised test’)
are to a certain extent opaque, cunning and non-transparent. What is clear
to its recipients though, is that the consequences of being elected are ‘real’,
not why, or how they have been chosen. From the students’ perspective,
a sense of luckiness is partly derived from them passing a series of institu­
tionalised qualification tests that had uncertain outcomes (Boltanski, 2011).

Critiquing the educationally lucky

The quest for a critical sociologist would be to unveil the institutional
framework and material privileges that lie behind the surface and explain
what enables successful educational admission into highly selective educa­
tional sites like Oxbridge. Following in the Bourdieusian tradition one
could, for instance, point to the propensity for misrecognition and the
collective amnesia of just how powerful the factor of parents’ involvement
and their class position is for enabling educational success as well as for the
cultivation of recognisable forms of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1990, 1991).
From a critical sociological vantage point, our analysis would then sug­
gest that the discourse of luck is incorporated into the language of the
16 R. YE AND E. NYLANDER

triumphant and the selected few. In other words, the discourse of luck might
very well be an inherent feature of meritocracy, a means for elite groups to
justify their life circumstances in societies that are increasingly unequal
(Piketty, 2014, 2020). Along these lines, humility could be considered
a rhetorical trope among high-achieving elites to mask their privileged
position in social space. This can be juxtaposed to contemporary commen­
tators like Frank (2016, p. 141) who ended his book on Success and Luck by
recommending that successful people be grateful for their own good fortune
as it may be in their interest to ‘acknowledge luck’s role in your success if
only because people will think better of you for having done so’.
As illustrated above, the students’ narratives of luck were not entirely
oriented toward gratefulness, humbleness and self-abasement; they also
contained a sense of deservedness. In the case of Singapore, Teo (2015)
coined the term ‘differentiated deservedness’ to portray social policies that
govern the distribution of public goods through highly differentiated means,
rendering unequal relationships between individuals and the state, and
ultimately assigning citizens with different roles, rights and rewards. This
concept was introduced in the context of examining the pro-family anti-
welfare regime of Singapore and for understanding the design and delivery
of public goods (Teo, 2015, 2018). We also see the utility of this notion in
examining educational trajectories. Since government scholarships are pub­
licly funded but accessible to only a select group of high-achieving students,
scholarships can be viewed as expressing an ethos of ‘differentiated deserv­
edness’, both in the mere existence of such a reward system as well as
through the narratives of its recipients. Due to its scarcity, expensiveness
and associated prestige, questions about the legitimacy of publicly funded
scholarships, who gets a scholarship and how it is disbursed are often
contested issues (Haas & Van De Werfhorst, 2017). For those who attain
this coveted prize, their sense of luckiness, as we see in this paper, is tied to
a sense of deservedness for being anointed as academically inclined or
gifted.
It is also necessary to situate these narratives within the context of
expectations placed on these students as Singaporean government scholars.
As scholarship recipients, their trajectories not only require them moving
away from home into a foreign country to receive an elite education abroad,
it also requires them to embark on a pathway that bonds them to the public
service for years to come. They have, to a large extent, been elected to
function in leadership roles within state bureaucracies and are destined to
occupy prominent positions within the administrative elite. As illustrated in
Ye (2016), the Singaporean scholars experienced this vocation as coming
with a sense of collective responsibility. Being groomed, selected and even­
tually chosen comes with an expectation to be grateful for this appointment
and to be modest of earlier achievements. Through experiencing the
 INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION 17

challenge of rising to the top of a stratified educational system and landing

in an overseas elite institution at Oxbridge, the values imposed on them
within a competitive and consecrated pathway challenge their conceptions
of deservingness, attainment and success.
Nevertheless, the critical inclination of unveiling the myths of meritoc­
racy and deservingness could easily undermine the radical uncertainty that
underpin successful educational trajectories into and through elite institu­
tions. One predicament of using the concept of misrecognition as a heuristic
to dissect narratives of elite students is the inevitability of subjecting the
students’ narratives on luck to doubt, or to question their convictions of
what they believe to have been important factors in their educational
careers. One of the merits of the pragmatic sociology of critique is that it
seeks to take the critical capacity and competence of everyday actors ser­
iously and suspend such critical intervention (Boltanski, 2011, p. 43). In
other words, if one is to only draw from the conceptual ammunition of
critical sociology, it is easy to eradicate the inherent element of uncertainty
in these educational trajectories, or suppress the objective existence of luck
that is still out there.
In the case of the Singaporean elite students interviewed, they have
had to participate in selection procedures that were underpinned with
considerable uncertainty. Since the rationality and premise of these
qualification tests remained opaque, they experienced a lingering sense
of gratefulness and luckiness that stemmed from the lack of transpar­
ency in these admission and selection processes. However, in economic
terms, one might venture to suggest that luck, in-of-itself, is unequally
distributed, or that luck always seems to happen to the same kind of
people (Boltanski, 2011, p. 38). It is therefore necessary to be mindful of
the pitfalls of overstating the role of luck in elite trajectories or, con­
versely, undermining its significance entirely.

Concluding remarks
Through this paper, we have detailed how an extremely select group of
academically successful students account for their educational trajec­
tories and success. We related their narratives with admission and
selection statistics and showed that although the data reveal strong
transnational institutional links between schools in Singapore and the
UK, the students alluded to being lucky in their educational trajec­
tories. From conducting an in-depth analysis of interview material, we
identified three main themes in the way that students use luck in their
narratives. The students linked their luckiness to deservedness, used
luck as a way to express humbleness, and attributed the success in
their educational trajectories to chance. The salience of these ideal-
18 R. YE AND E. NYLANDER

type categories was not mutually exclusive in that the same student
could often ride on rhetorical tropes belonging to more than one of
these themes throughout the interviews. For example, they could move
from initially pointing out how hard they had worked, to how happy
and relieved they are to be successful and, finally, assigning the
successful outcome to fate or chance.
By being attentive to how luck is evoked in these narratives, we show
that luck does not have an essential meaning and can produce different
representations of legitimacy. Narratives of luck can give legitimacy to
the privilege and uphold beliefs in meritocracy, or conversely under­
mine beliefs in meritocracy when elite groups misrecognise privilege.
Rather than pointing to luck as being ignored from the dominant
meritocratic understanding of how schools and societies are organised,
we highlight how it can be seen as an inherent feature of dominant
discourse, a means for elite groups to justify their life circumstances in
societies that are increasingly unequal. At the same time, this critique
should not make us oblivious to the element of luck and its potential
role in shaping elite educational trajectories.
In conclusion, our empirical findings make visible the multiplicity
of meanings which individuals use to assign ‘luck’ a role in explaining
their educational trajectories. Specifically, this paper has shown how
elite students shift in defining their educational attainments and
success: from embracing and incorporating the notion of luck into
their narratives to also distancing themselves from this very same
conception in other situations. To further advance the sociological
study of elites, it could be fruitful to integrate the conventional
critical perspective with more detailed empirical examinations of
how elite groups qualify for the positions they obtain, how they
define themselves and make sense of their educational merits.
Rather than exclusively using categories external to elite groups to
unveil their privilege, we argue that future research of elite educa­
tional trajectories should take seriously the uncertainty of these qua­
lification processes and the ambiguities involved in justifying their
outcomes (Boltanski, 2011; Boltanski et al., 2010). Interrogating self-
perpetuated representations of elite groups is paramount, particularly
if their educational attainment and achievements continue to be held
up as standards of success.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
 INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION 19

Notes on contributors
Rebecca Ye is Assistant Professor at the Department of Education, Stockholm University.
Her research focuses on what goes on at the intersection of education and labour markets,
and pays special attention to vocations, trajectories and temporality.
Erik Nylander is Associate Professor at the Department of Behavioural Sciences and
Learning, Linköping University and NTU-Wallenberg Fellow at Nanyang Technological
University in Singapore. He has published on jazz auditioning, folk high schools, biblio­
metrics and the sociology of elites.

ORCID
Rebecca Ye http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8524-671X
Erik Nylander http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3241-0189

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