The first time, it felt like a small stroke of luck.
Two years ago we moved from Pakistan to a small university town in Virginia, USA, one of those places where the campus seems to be the town and the town seems to exist because the university does. I had arrived from Habib University for a fully funded master's degree. My husband, a LUMS graduate, had come for his PhD. Both of us expected graduate school to produce the usual small humiliations of migration. Rehearsing our own names until they sounded intelligible to American ears and deciding, every time someone asked a simple question about home, exactly how much of Pakistan the answer required.
What surprised me was how little distance seemed to matter. Within days, we already had a social circle of around ten LUMS graduates along with their partners, a little Lahore lodged inside this Appalachian landscape. It turned out that one lab at our university had become particularly well known among students. Seniors told juniors, faculty recommended students and names travelled like that. Someone who was already here could tell you which professor had funding available or simply that applying here was worth a shot.
In April we attended a major conference in Spain and once again found ourselves among LUMS graduates. Two months later, we moved to California for an internship and stepped into much the same social world there: old campus stories at meetups, updates about professors' lives, news of who had gone where after graduation, and the kind of shared repertoire through which an institution reproduces its social world beyond the campus.
Of course, my husband is a LUMS graduate so its alumni were naturally more visible to us. Still, what we were noticing was not confined to our own social circle. The university's 2024 Academic Report says that over the years, “30 percent” of its graduates have been placed in highly reputed international programmes, many with competitive scholarships. Its 2025 graduating class alone included more than 1,400 students across five schools. Even allowing for differences between cohorts and disciplines, this is difficult to describe as a collection of isolated success stories. But success has a strange way of making its indebtedness difficult to see.
The social life of “merit”
Pierre Bourdieu spent much of his work on education dismantling the fiction that institutions simply discover talent. Educational institutions also reward and convert forms of capital into credentials, and that capital does not arrive all at once. Some of it precedes the student into the room. A young person educated in an O-levels school may already know how to write in the register universities reward, speak in class without experiencing authority as intimidating, or imagine an academic career abroad as something people like them actually do. Once inside the university, those dispositions meet new forms of advantage. Office hours with a professor open the way to a research assistantship; the research assistantship becomes a strong recommendation letter; the professor knows an alumnus at a lab abroad, who tells the student about an opening. A senior shares an old statement of purpose. Someone explains that American PhDs are commonly funded and that the first rejection is normal.
By the time the student receives a funded master's or PhD offer, the steps that made the outcome possible can disappear from view and the acceptance letter closes the story as a credential of self-making.
This is not to discredit the work involved, since the student still has to study, write, research, apply and compete; the point is that achievement reaches the admissions committee already furnished with signs of its own legitimacy: a glowing reference from a professor whose international standing gives the letter weight, an undergraduate project completed in a functioning lab, an unpaid summer opportunity made possible because their parents could absorb the rent.
The “cream of the crop” argument
Reading these successes primarily through forms of social and cultural capital invites an obvious objection: don't elite universities also select unusually strong students to begin with?
Of course they do, and that is precisely what makes merit so difficult to parse. These institutions admit students who have already distinguished themselves in intensely competitive processes, and what the university first selects for soon becomes entangled with what it later helps to produce until the two are difficult to tell apart.
Scholarships complicate the story further. LUMS's National Outreach Programme travels to schools and colleges in towns and villages across Pakistan looking for high-achieving students with financial need, then brings shortlisted students to campus for summer coaching, covers their admissions-test costs, and provides extensive financial support to those eventually admitted through the programme.
These scholars are more than convenient exceptions because their stories pull at the neat fiction that students arrive carrying the makings of their future success with them and reveal the institution's capacity to generate new forms of capital. A scholarship can transform one student's life without transforming the educational landscape that made such intervention necessary. Once that student enters an institution rich in research infrastructure and dense networks of people who know how institutions work, the distance between their possibilities and those of others from the same socioeconomic class may actually grow. Exceptional success can then perform a peculiar ideological function. The scholarship student who reaches Oxford, Stanford or a funded PhD becomes proof that the system is “open” to anyone sufficiently talented.
But everyone has Google these days
One might argue that in an era of open information these institutional advantages should matter less. Almost everything is technically available online from statement-of-purpose guides and websites of funded programmes to Reddit threads explaining stipends down to the cost of groceries.
But you have to know that funded PhDs exist before you search for them.
Similarly, knowing how to draft an email to a professor is of limited use if you have never been socialised to believe that emailing a foreign professor is a normal, valid action for someone like you to take. The internet democratises access to answers much more effectively than it democratises access to questions and search engines become useful only once you know what to look for.
The National Outreach Programme lays bare this distinction. If information were enough, there would be little reason for representatives to travel across Pakistan explaining that the programme exists. Access to information is not the same as what Arjun Appadurai calls the “capacity to aspire”: the ability to place a desired future within a landscape of choices and precedents that make it seem possible.
So, what does “fully funded” actually cost?
When I got into my master's programme, its full funding made the achievement feel almost perfectly meritocratic: work hard and eventually the financial barrier disappears. I have since realised that qualifying for that “free” opportunity cost a great deal. And I had understood some version of this long before I had the language for it.
Six years ago, I chose to study Comparative Humanities at Habib University, itself an elite private liberal arts institution, partly because the university name made an unconventional humanities degree feel compatible with postgraduate mobility. I doubt I would have made the same choice had an identical programme been offered at an underfunded institution with few visible pathways beyond graduation.
I am not observing these structures from somewhere outside them.
At Habib, graduate study abroad was imaginable to me because there were visiting speakers and professors who had studied abroad themselves. So while the funding from my master's programme covered the price of attending graduate school, that price was also paid in good schooling, time, financial cushioning and perhaps most invisibly repeated exposure to people for whom the route was not extraordinary.
International mobility is of course only one possible educational outcome and leaving Pakistan is hardly the measure of a successful education. I chose to write about it because it is scarce and highly institutionalised, therefore unusually revealing of how opportunity travels.
Getting into an elite university still guarantees nothing, since programmes can reject you and funding can fall through, but what these institutions can provide is something like a boarding pass that tells you where the gates are and that others before you have made the same passage, which is very different from standing outside the terminal trying to work out how to enter.