This dissertation reports the results of research in one field of social reproduction in Egypt. It focuses on how students of a private liberal arts-oriented university in Cairo, and by extension their families, develop educational strategies and the occupational aspirations that guide them in order to maintain and improve their personal prestige and status positions within Egyptian society. The theoretical orientation guiding the research and this presentation is that of cultural reproduction theory, primarily as it has been developed by Pierre Bourdieu. The study provides analyses of both primary and secondary data. The primary data were collected through a self-administered questionnaire given to a probability sample of undergraduate students; structured interviews; open-ended interviews; and free-listing, card-sorting and rank-ordering exercises. Though the population was highly homogeneous, educational and occupational expectations and aspirations were found to differ in important ways along several dimensions. Factors that were found to be most salient include students' pre-university educational attributes; the level of English competency; whether students came from old or new money families; variances in students' socioeconomic backgrounds; and, most important, gender. Cultural reproduction theory was found to offer an insightful explanation for the variations found in this otherwise relatively uniform group of students. However, several shortcomings in the theory also became apparent, including the vagueness of the central concept of habitus and an underdeveloped conceptualization of gender within the framework.
