Geographies of wealth: the materiality of an elite school in Switzerland

ABSTRACT

Elite schools, long tasked with creating a future national elite, often now find themselves competing in a global education market. This article explores how one such school, in Switzerland, articulates with the global imaginary of its local geography – in particular, with images of luxury tourism and safety – to appeal to a globally wealthy clientele. It unpacks the material benefits derived from this articulation, for both the institution itself and the individuals who attend it. The school, I argue, fostered a ‘club effect’ that enhanced the social and symbolic capital of (most of) its students, brought into relief by the scholarship students who were excluded from it. This article thus explores what kind of work is being done when a particular vision – that of wealth – is attached to a school, and for whom that work is done. It closes by pointing to ways in which this educational landscape is shifting.

KEYWORDS:

• Club effect
• elite education
• elites
• everyday nationalism
• tourism
• Switzerland
• wealth

Introduction

Elite schools, here defined as those charging high fees and thus serving wealthy families, can have complex relationships with the countries in which they are located. Although creating a future national elite for those countries has long been the raison d’état of such schools (Khan, 2011; Koh, 2014; Maxwell & Aggleton, 2014), these institutions have increasingly been inserted into a global education market (Bunnell, Courtois, & Donnelly, 2020; McCarthy, Bulut, Castro, Goel, & Greenhalgh-Spencer, 2014; Rizvi, 2015). As such, tapping into widely-accepted global imaginaries of their geographical spaces – particularly when those spaces are seen as high-status – appears to be one strategy to ensure that an elite school remains competitive on a global scale.

This article unpacks the material benefits that can be derived when a school activates its high-status locality to attract high-wealth families globally, for both the institution itself and the individuals who attend it. In line with Gamsu (2022), who showed in the context of English elite schools that physical proximity to capital ‘form[s] the material basis for the symbolic and cultural prestige that is accumulated by these schools and their pupils’ (p. 23), I here argue that an elite school in Switzerland put the country’s reputation as a wealthy space to work to attract a globally rich clientele, who themselves then benefit from a resultant ‘club effect’ (Bourdieu, 1999). This extends work that has shown that elite schools in Switzerland, which typically educate a primarily non-Swiss student body, draw on their location to ‘brand’ themselves as places of symbolic capital (Bertron, 2016b).

How this plays out on-the-ground reflects Friedman’s (2018) concept of ‘everyday nationalism’. Friedman argues, in the context of higher education, that universities ‘have invoked the notions of globalization, internationalization, and cosmopolitanism’ (p. 248) while simultaneously being framed by their own personnel ‘as embodying national characteristics, and as obliged to serve national interests’ (p. 247). ‘Everyday nationalism’ helps us to unpack how and why a school located in Switzerland strategically developed into a space that appeals to a global clientele by leaning on the reputation and characteristics of its local geography.

The article starts by exploring a widely recognised image of Switzerland: wealth. It then examines how the school site derived material benefits from putting this image to work, through the themes of luxury tourism and safety. The section thereafter turns to who benefits from this (wealthy students, through a ‘club effect’) and who does not (the few need-based scholarship students). Finally, the article points to shifts in this educational landscape that might destabilise the ability of schools like this one to stake their viability on a connection to Switzerland.

Switzerland as a symbol of wealth

Switzerland is often seen as the world’s epicentre for wealth. The country is associated not only with its luxury products (e.g. fine chocolate and high-end watches) but also with its wealthy population. In 2022, Swiss adults owned an average of US$685,000, making them the world’s richest people (Shorrocks, Davies, Lluberas, & Waldenström, 2023). Also in 2022, Switzerland hosted 2% of the world’s millionaires, comprising 13% of its population (Shorrocks et al., 2023). As one student at my field site said, ‘I’m in Switzerland, the country of gold’ (Guozhi).

One well-known way that Switzerland attracts wealthy individuals is through its banking sector (see also Bertron, 2018), whose primary expertise is wealth management (Araujo, 2020). In 2022, Swiss banks managed 7.8 trillion Swiss francs of private wealth, 46% of which was held by foreign clients (Swiss Bankers Association, 2023). The globally rich seem to seek Switzerland’s ‘careful paperwork, utter discretion, long-established banks and financial institutions … and the asking of no questions and hence no need to tell lies’ (Urry, 2014, p. 229).

Historically, Switzerland has been a place where the wealthy, taking advantage of a globalised financial landscape, could hold their money to evade income taxes in their own states. In the early twentieth century, Switzerland was the ‘refuge of choice’ for foreign money due to its low taxes and neutrality during World War One (Guex, 2000, p. 242). This led to the Banking Secrecy Act of 1934, preventing the disclosure of banking activities with third parties (Guex, 2000; see also Farquet, 2018). Even recently, popular audience books have offered tips on how to use Switzerland as a tax haven (Barber, 2008). It is thus no surprise that a data leak from Credit Suisse in 2022 about accounts held from the 1940s through the 2010s highlighted the Swiss bank’s role in tax evasion and money laundering for the global super-rich (Drucker & Hubbard, 2022; see also Rossier, 2019).

However, this image of Swiss banking is shifting. In 2018, the Banking Secrecy Act was dismantled. As a result, because of more rigorous tax compliance laws, the proportion of private wealth held by foreign clients in Swiss banks has since fallen (Swiss Bankers Association, 2023). According to one study of the global rich’s real estate investments, this change in tax haven status has led to the relocation of assets from Swiss banks to prime real estate in New York and London, as well as in Swiss luxury tourism destinations like Davos (Fernandez, Hofman, & Aalbers, 2016). This appears to be true despite Swiss legislation (the Lex Koller) restricting particular kinds of foreign investment in residential real estate; although, this is loosest in touristic, alpine areas (Vögeli, Fey, & Zbinden, 2022) and does not apply to commercial properties (Swissinfo.ch, 2021).

Giddey and Mazbouri (2022) show the Swiss banking sector went through a number of major crises between 1850 and 2000; although, those phases have what the authors call ‘low importance in collective memory’, meaning that they have not changed the ‘perception of the Swiss banking sector as a model of stability’ (p. 247). Therefore, despite challenges to Switzerland’s banking sector, the country’s reputation as an attractive home for the global wealthy has endured.¹ Effectively, what this means for the argument at hand is that elite schools in Switzerland can activate their local geography to their advantage when trying to attract a global clientele.

Methodology

This article draws from a larger project involving 15 months of fieldwork at the Leysin American School (LAS), located in Leysin, Switzerland. The school is broadly considered one of the most expensive schools in the world, charging 120,000 Swiss francs per year as of 2024. At the time of fieldwork, LAS educated 330 young men and women, ages 12–18, from 40 nations. Despite ‘American’ being in the name – a relic from its foundation as a school for overseas Americans (Lillie, 2022) – Americans were only the second most-represented nationality, behind Russians. Approximately 3% of students there were Swiss. This is typical of Swiss private boarding schools; only around 5% of Swiss children are educated outside of the state system (Expatica, 2024). In other words, such schools primarily serve a global clientele, not a national one.

The Leysin American School is the real name of the institution. Access to the school’s community and archive (and permission to use its name) was granted by the Head of School; although, it must be noted that I had worked at LAS as a college counsellor and member of the dormitory staff. Being an ‘insider’ comes with entangled benefits and challenges. Such a positionality, for instance, is often necessary to gain research access to elite school sites (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2009; Howard, 2008; Khan, 2011), yet can also make participants distrustful of the researcher – ‘spy’, for instance, being a word that a former colleague used to describe me (see also Cunningham-Sabot, 1999). Additionally, being an insider can give one a better sense of what matters at a site, leading to stronger studies, but can also make it difficult to see past one’s own assumptions (Hirsch, 1995). For a full discussion of this in relation to my research processes, please see Lillie and Ayling (2021). Ethics approval for this study was granted by my institution at the time.

I interviewed 19 students, chosen from a particular year group using purposive sampling to ensure that I had ‘information rich’ data (Patton, 1990, 2014). The sample was 20% of that year group. Consent was granted from both the young people themselves and their parents. In interviews, I explored these young people’s subjectivities. I used a semi-structured interview guide, refined through a pilot study, and asked questions that were open-ended and that elicited elaboration (Brenner, 2006). More specifically, I asked the young people about their time before and transition to LAS, their experiences at the school and their future aspirations. All participants were given pseudonyms.

In addition, I observed the LAS community’s day-to-day activities and took fieldnotes on the general goings-on at the institution. When observing others, one runs the risk that the observed will alter their behaviour (Corwin & Clemens, 2012). However, from my background knowledge, I found this not to be the case. My fieldnotes usefully contributed to a picture of how the data gathered from interviews manifested in everyday practices.

This article also draws from sources in the school’s archive – particularly, annual reports, Board reports and memos. Such documents are ‘deeply embedded in organisational routines and practices’ (Scott, 1990, p. 83) and so can offer insight into decisions made (Spohr Readman, 2009); however, they can also muffle dissenting voices, giving an illusion of unanimity (McCulloch, 2004). I thus approached these documents as reflecting and enacting a particular picture of LAS.

Wealth and schooling in Switzerland

This section discusses two different images of Switzerland that are associated with wealth and put to work by LAS to its material advantage: that of luxury tourism and of safety. Friedman’s (2018) theoretical lens helps frame this as a strategy to appeal to a global clientele by leaning on the reputation and characteristics of the local environment. In essence, these images suggest that foreigners can be educated at LAS as tourists safely among their fellow rich.

Luxury tourism

Luxury tourism is the purview of the wealthy, involving high costs for travel, accommodation, meals and activities (through fees, equipment, guides, etc). Switzerland has long been a luxury tourism destination. The country was often included in the Grand Tours of the British upper classes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; although, the British middle classes also increasingly travelled there when guidebooks, railways and travel agencies evolved in the second half of the nineteenth century (Tissot, 1995). This massive development in the transport sector gave rise to new tourism-related infrastructure, particularly in Switzerland’s alpine regions: hotels, restaurants, sports facilities, shops and even churches (Lüthi, 2005). In the major cities around the Lake Geneva region, luxury hotels were established (Tissot, 1999).

Swiss tourism has also had a longstanding relationship with the country’s educational landscape. The establishment and development of secondary schools in alpine Switzerland from 1875–1950 happened in concert with the economic advancement of the region, linked to growth in the transportation, tourism, health and sporting sectors, and catered to the globally wealthy set (Metz, 2019). The Swiss Private Schools’ Association even helped produce tourism materials in the early twentieth century, which ‘defined, idealised and commodified the educational product’ (Swann, 2007, p. 37) – a product that only the rich could afford to buy.

LAS tapped into this connection between tourism and education from the beginning. Two of the five men on LAS’s first Board of Directors were from the tourism industry, brought on for their expertise in ‘Swiss education, economics and tourism’ according to a letter from 1960. One, Hunziker, co-founded the International Association of Scientific Experts in Tourism and ran a seminar for tourism at the University of St. Gallen (Schumacher, 2002). He also established the tourism company Leysintours in 1956, based in the town of Leysin where LAS would be situated five years later. A Board report from 1960 notes that Leysintours rented out the first building to the school, a deal brokered through Tissot, a hotelier and the other Board member connected to tourism.

Over the next few decades, according to internal memos and reports, the school’s marketing materials were packaged in folders from Swissair, the country’s national airline, and distributed to foreign offices as well as to tourism agencies and bureaus. The school also directly drew from local luxury tourism for its marketing. The Director of Admissions, for example, started and ended a pitch to a prospective family in 1981 by highlighting typical touristic concerns (the weather and the entertainment), and sandwiched mention of formal learning in between: ‘Leysin American School offers the best of all possible worlds: lots of clean, pure air and sunshine, an American curriculum … and the anticipated Alpine sports activities’. This strategy of articulating with tourism as a selling point is not unique to LAS: Hotel schools in Switzerland have also been shown to do this, to attract students (Delval, 2022).

This strategy seemed to work for LAS. Helena’s mom, for example, wanted her to study at LAS because she ‘thinks Switzerland is like the most glamorous place ever. She sees it in the mag[azine]s’. Ahmed told me he enrolled at the school because ‘a lot of [other] Saudis come around here, around Lake Geneva … [it’s] famous – famous and nice’. Magnus transferred there from a school ‘in the desert’ to study in what he called ‘a vacation destination’. Natalia enrolled at LAS because she had heard:

these amazing stories about skiing, chocolate, cheese. I was like, I’m going there. I was like, chocolate – delicious chocolate, cheese, I get to practise all my languages, get to ski, it’s in the middle of everything so I’m going to get to travel, meet other people … [trailed off]. So, I was very happy.

Notably, these reasons have little to do with education and a lot to do with tourism: food, activities, travel, and socialising.

There were moments, however, in which activating Switzerland’s connection to luxury tourism did not work to LAS’s benefit. Sometimes this was economic. In 1978, for instance, the annual report claimed that LAS’s finances had been negatively affected by ‘the decline in the number of American tourists (and students) in Switzerland’ – notably placing ‘students’ not only second to tourists but also in parentheses. Other times, it was reputational. One headmaster wrote in the 1977 Board report, ‘We have to get away from the widespread and erroneous opinion that LAS is a form of “holiday camp”’. However, given that LAS did not significantly pivot away from putting Swiss tourism to work, the strategy seems to have been, on the whole, successful.

The language of tourism also filtered down to students’ experiences. When I asked participants whether they felt that LAS was Swiss, 10 of the 19 simply said ‘no’. Their reasons included having classes on national holidays and the language offerings – French and Spanish rather than French, German and/or Italian, the official major languages of the country. Overall, however, these young people did not seem bothered by this. As Irina summarised, ‘The fact that [LAS is] located in Switzerland doesn’t mean that we have to celebrate every Swiss holiday, or everyone should speak French’.

Linking to tourism was one way for LAS to reconcile the tension between being in Switzerland and catering to an international clientele. Doing so implied that its students could retain their own national identities while being educated in another country. LAS did not face the paradox that elite schools in England (Brooks & Waters, 2015) and Ireland (Courtois, 2016) have been shown to face: internationalising while trying to outwardly preserve their national identity, which is what many global families find attractive in the first place. Instead, it was precisely this sense of being a tourist in Switzerland, rather than becoming Swiss, that families seemed to seek.

A safe space

A second image put to work by LAS is that of Switzerland as a safe space – an image that had been deliberately cultivated by the country. Swiss tourism materials in the interwar period portrayed the country as ‘a safe, moral destination’ (Swann, 2007, p. 37). When Hitler moved to incorporate German-speaking geographies into the German state, Switzerland deployed pictures of the Alps to signal its defences (Zimmer, 1998).

This sense of safety was derived from isolation not just from aggressors but also from disease. Alpine Switzerland has a history of sanatoriums catering to the wealthy, dating back to around the 1880s, and so has long been seen as a place where the rich can recover from illness (Lüthi, 2005) – as notably immortalised in The Magic Mountain (Mann, 1924), among other novels, plays and films. Although many of Switzerland’s sanatoriums have since been converted into hotels and, yes, schools, the country maintains its connection to health. Since 1948, for example, it has hosted the World Health Organisation.

At LAS, these connections are first apparent on a visual level. LAS’s campus is elevated and remote – looking down over the valley from the highest part of the highest village on an alpine mountain. In this way, LAS taps into a social stratification of space – one in which the rich are ‘above’ the rest. Additionally, the school’s main building is a former sanatorium, built in 1890. This fact is obvious from its architecture: huge sun-facing windows and verandas, and a solarium – architecture otherwise rarely found in the Alps (Lüthi, 2005).

Conveying safety through isolation is characteristic of elite schools in a number of settings. Private schools in nineteenth century Germany moved to the countryside, in response to the bourgeoisie’s desire for a more ‘natural’ life outside the industrialising cities (Gerster, 2020). At the end of the nineteenth century, elite schools in rural America became an escape for the established elite from both industrialists and immigrants (Levine, 1980), while schools in London relocated to the countryside to maintain or enhance their elite status (Gamsu, 2016). Today, British schools still emphasise their geographical isolation to signal social distinction (Waters & Brooks, 2015).

LAS strategically used Switzerland’s connection to safety in its marketing materials. The school’s brochure, for example, read, ‘Switzerland is a place like no other; one that is safe and welcoming with breath-taking scenery, historical cities, and a vibrant culture.’ The very next sentence reiterates those themes: ‘Switzerland has a healthy climate and a safe, stable environment.’ As marketing materials offer insight into how an institution legitimises its existence, the repetition of the word ‘safe’ is not insignificant.

This seemed to successfully attract families looking to protect their children. According to interviews, some students went to LAS in search of refuge from their home government (e.g. in Russia). Others sought to escape the mental health pressures brought on by their home educational systems (e.g. in Taiwan and the US; see also, Bertron, 2016a). Still others looked for safety from crime, against their persons or belongings, as wealthy young people in their home countries (e.g. of Iran and Saudi Arabia) – interesting here is the implication that safety can be found in the company of other wealthy individuals, and in isolation from the less well off.

That last point is critical. Because almost all students at LAS were very wealthy, the young people there did not face ideological challenges to their privilege. They did not have to defend or legitimise their wealth; it was simply a fact of their day-to-day lives. One can imagine that this is a selling point for families shopping around the global education market, looking for a place where their children can live normal lives – where displaying or discussing wealth does not make them stand out (especially not as a target), but instead works to their advantage when trying to fit in (see Lillie & Maxwell, 2023). In this way, LAS positioned itself as a space where its young people can be educated not just as tourists, but as tourists safely in the company of other wealthy individuals.

The included and the excluded

LAS employed discourses that catered to the wealthy. This, I argue, ultimately fostered a ‘club effect’ (Bourdieu, 1999) that enhanced the social and symbolic capital of (most of) its students, brought into relief by the scholarship students who were excluded from it. Through this lens, we see that when wealthy young people are educated at an expensive, isolated boarding school, they profit from being in such an economically homogenous space. Following Massey (2007), who calls for critical reflection on who benefits from asserting and propagating a particular identity of a particular place, this section explores what kind of work is being done when a certain vision – that of wealth – is attached to a school, and for whom that work is done.

Discourses for the rich

During my fieldwork, the Head of School often described LAS’s past to students, staff and prospective families as ‘humble’, saying, for example, ‘It was a humble school’ or ‘It has humble roots’. This narrative was directly legitimised by his then pointing to the school’s laundry policy. LAS students were required to do their own laundry. An entire section of the student handbook was dedicated to explaining who teaches students how to do laundry (dormitory staff), what is provided (machines and detergent) and what would be washed for students (bedding). For the younger students, doing laundry was integrated into the so-called ‘life skills curriculum’.

At the same time, LAS highlighted its ‘rich’ past and present. For example, marketing materials describe its main building as a former ‘luxurious sanatorium that catered to the wealthy’, apparently including Igor Stravinsky, Tsar Nicholas II, Marie Curie, and Mahatma Gandhi, among other famous names (LASAD, School for the World, 2011). In a news article from 2015, the then-Head of Operations described LAS as ‘a golden cage’ (Thavevong, 2015) – seemingly to convey the luxury provided by LAS, in a space closed off from the world.

Although these two sets of discourses might seem to be in conflict, they both cater to the wealthy. The latter more obviously frames LAS as a space for the rich. The former, however, also speaks to the values of hard work and dedication that wealthy families often want to tap into and claim, to justify their privilege. Doing laundry thus becomes a mechanism to foster legitimising character traits (like asceticism and self-possession, Bourdieu, 1989), as well as the confidence that such ‘hard work’ signals deservedness (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2009). It also perhaps eases the difficulty that wealthy people sometimes face in acknowledging their privilege and power, by justifying it (see Sherman, 2019). However marginal the effect of learning to do laundry is in developing these traits is beside the point.

The two discourses in combination also serve to distinguish LAS in the educational market. While conducting research on eight Swiss boarding schools, for example, Caroline Bertron was told by a headmaster, ‘We are not, as they are sometimes called, elite schools’ (2016b, p. 171). I was told something similar when I asked LAS’s Head of School for permission to conduct research on elite schooling there. As a Bourdieusian strategy of distinction (Bourdieu, 1979), Bertron theorises, denying the ‘elite school’ label suggests that the institution cannot be put in a generic box (even that of ‘elite school’) but that it instead offers a unique array of symbolic capital. As such, doing so is a strategic marketing move.

The club effect

Yet, even aside from the discourses catering to the rich, LAS’s fees alone (120,000 Swiss francs per year) ensure that only the wealthy can enrol, save for scholarship recipients. This leads to the creation of a ‘club effect’:

social capital, and symbolic capital, [procured] from the long-term gathering together (in chic neighborhoods or luxury homes) of people and things which are different from the vast majority and have in common the fact that they are not common, this is, the fact that they exclude everyone who does not present all the desired attributes or who presents (at least) one undesirable attribute. (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 129)

In this case, such capitals were bolstered through a signalling of wealth. Ya-Hui from Taiwan proudly explained to me that attending a Swiss boarding school ‘makes people feel like you’re rich and smart’. Similarly, Irina from Russia told me, ‘The type of people who come here, they’re really rich, right? So, people here often see Russians as really rich people. I don’t know – strange but it suits’. For these young women, LAS was attractive because of the work that studying there did to consolidate their social positionalities.

One way that the ‘included’ were distinguished from the ‘excluded’ at LAS was through dress. Although students had to wear uniforms, they could accessorise as they wished. Over one day of roaming the halls, I observed 32 luxury brand items amongst the 96 final year students, as outlined in Table 1. Those items started at 700 Swiss francs (shoes). The Rolex probably cost around 9,000 Swiss francs. By allowing students to accessorise their uniforms, however, such accessories became like uniforms. In other words, when so many of the young people wear them, they are no longer noticeable. This deflects attention away from their material value – the same to which I just brought your attention – and makes them ordinary.

Table 1. Luxury brand items observed in one day, amongst the 96 final year students.

Wristwatch	Shoes	Purse	Bracelet	Backpack
Omega (1)	Chanel (1)	Chanel (2)	Cartier (3)	Fendi (2)
Piguet (1)	Gucci (3)	Fendi (1)
Rolex (1)	Valentino (6)	Gucci (6)
		Prada (4)
		Saint Laurent (1)

But perhaps this effect is most salient when considering those excluded from it within the space (not to mention all of those who are not there at all): the scholarship students. In each year group, two students were awarded full need-based scholarships. Although they sometimes had few financial resources, such as one from a rice farming family, they often could be considered part of the global middle class.

These students were excluded from the ‘norm’ by both the institution and their peers. Institutionally, the school leadership framed them as essentially doing labour for the school. For example, although the school brochure does not mention scholarships, the school website does, in the context of encouraging donations. Such explicit fundraising is perhaps unsurprising, as it would deflect concerns from fee-paying parents that their money subsidises scholarship places. The website stated, ‘Our top university applications often come from our scholarship program’. The school thus justified having scholarship students by their carrying the academic burden of the institution. At the same time, because these students needed to reapply for their scholarship every year, their presence at LAS was precarious. In this way, they were treated as party to a quid-pro-quo transaction – one that could be cancelled at any time if the terms of engagement were broken.

Scholarship students were also excluded from the school culture by their peers. One interviewee even explicitly told me that scholarship students were not part of the ‘uniform culture’ of the school (Wei). Another student, Luke, independently explained why: Financial resources shaped ‘where kids travel together, who kids hang out with, attitudes towards school … You know, never eating in the cafeteria and ordering food every night. It just creates separations.’ In other words, socialising at LAS is expensive (see Lillie & Maxwell, 2023); if you cannot afford it, you are left out. As Ya-Hui told me, ‘There’s a lot of higher income families – children – here and there’s also a few that are not, and it’s really obvious that they’re probably not as happy to be here as the rest.’

However, the scholarship students themselves did not always see it this way. One, Guozhi, highlighted some possible future economic benefits from having networked with his classmates:

The connections [students] make here would translate into, perhaps, future dealings with – perhaps, getting relationships with or building up – companies … The general profile of students here is that of upper class to high class families so, regardless, you’d be making powerful and wealthy friends and that’s a plus.

In fact, the scholarship students I spoke with said nothing negative about their experiences as such – though, I did not specifically ask about that, and, moreover, since I had worked at the school, they may not have wanted to appear ungrateful to a member of staff. Yet, what I observed backed up Luke’s comment, above: social cliques fell very much along socio-economic lines.

What this suggests about the material basis of a school like LAS is that selecting students by wealth in the admissions process shapes LAS’s functionality – in part, as discussed here, in enhancing the social and symbolic capitals of wealthy young people. Yet, LAS is a school and so to maintain legitimacy as such, it appears to invest money in attracting students who will carry its academic outcomes. Interestingly, this contrasts with the social legitimation function that scholarship students in elite schools often have: Providing evidence that such schools are not economically exclusionary (see, for example, Courtois, 2015). What this means for LAS’s scholarship students in the long run remains to be seen – if they will, in fact, benefit from having made ‘powerful and wealthy friends’, as Guozhi put it, or if they will continue to be excluded from those networks (see Young, Goldman, O’Connor, & Chuluun, 2021).

Outlook

This article has argued that a boarding school for the wealthy, LAS, materially benefits from articulating with its rich host country, Switzerland, as do the wealthy individuals who attend the school. Informed by the notion of ‘everyday nationalism’ (Friedman, 2018), I explained how the school, which has hardly any Swiss students, developed into a space that appeals to a global clientele by leaning on the reputation of its local environment. The school puts to work Switzerland’s association with wealth, by bringing together the related imagery of safety and luxury tourism, to attract the global rich. That the school has been successful in this approach suggests one reason why families might invest in a Swiss education, from a global perspective: they seek a space in which their children can be educated abroad in an economically homogenous, and therefore ‘safe’, environment, as tourists – i.e. without being nationalised.

Yet, the outlook suggests that such a mechanism of material gain may not work forever. If LAS is complacent with putting Switzerland’s images to work to its material benefit, it will likely, at some point, be met with the realities of increasing competition in the global education market. One aspect of this relates to the complexities of emerging geopolitics. The global rise of Asia, for instance, has created new spaces of competition for places like LAS (see Rizvi, 2022). Over the last decade, British elite schools have increasingly opened branch campuses in Asia, securing a corner of the market there (Bunnell et al., 2020).

There is also the related phenomenon of commercialised education. According to its registration with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Nord Anglia Education (NAE), for example, runs for-profit schools ‘in geographic markets with high FDI [foreign direct investment], large expatriate populations and rising disposable income’ (Nord Anglia Education Inc, 2015). In the 2022 fiscal year, NAE generated $1.5 billion in revenue (Moody’s Investors Service, 2023). As of 2023, the company owned 81 schools in 32 countries, with the largest concentrations in China (23) and the US (10), and 5 schools in Switzerland (Nord Anglia Education Inc, 2023).

In 2010, a peer school of LAS’s, Collège Alpin Beau Soleil, was bought by NAE. Both schools teach the same standardised curriculum (the International Baccalaureate) to a similar population – roughly the same number of students in the same age range, who are almost exclusively non-Swiss and very wealthy – although, the fees at Beau Soleil are even higher than at LAS, at around 130,000 Swiss francs per year, depending on the class year. Although it is not rare for NAE to buy schools, it does seem rare for them to purchase established ones like Beau Soleil, which was founded in 1910.

This transaction inserts commercialised education into the institutional landscape that LAS is very much a part of (Bertron, 2019). It also reflects the span of the global education industry, which, as discussed by Bunnell et al. (2020), puts increased pressure on other education providers, like LAS in this case, to become more ‘corporate’ to better compete in this shifting field. As such, LAS has become embedded in global capitalism not only through its clientele, a cross-section of the world’s wealthiest families, but also through its institutional positionality, as a school increasingly competing against global educational actors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The most recent crisis was the emergency takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS in March 2023, to stabilize the country’s banking system.