When Things Don’t Go as Planned: Contingencies, Cultural Capital, and Parental Involvement for Elite University Admission in China YI-LIN CHIANG Studies often portray cultural capital as a constant source of advantage. Yet this per- spective underemphasizes the importance of activating cultural capital as a prerequisite for elite families to accrue its benefits. Using ethnography and interviews with elite students and parents in two top-performing public high schools in Beijing, I find that elite parents typically relied on the school to prepare children for college. However, they ac- tivated cultural capital and became heavily involved when their children experienced academic setbacks, which put elite university admission at risk. In many but not all instances, parental involvement buffered children from test failures and provided chil- dren with additional chances to pursue elite university admission. The findings show that parental activation of cultural capital is not constant, but reactive and not always effective. Using the examples of Chinese students, I argue for the contingent nature of parental involvement and highlight the limits of cultural capital. Introduction In examining how cultural capital contributes to educational outcomes, studies often emphasize the positive effect of class-based parental involve- ment on children’s schooling outcomes. 1 This body of literature describes elite cultural capital as a constant source of advantage because elite parents have high levels of intervention in children’s education (Lareau and Wei- ninger 2003; Lareau 2011; Calarco 2014). However, not all wealthy parents regularly intervene in their children’s schooling. This suggests that one needs not only to possess but also to activate cultural capital to accrue its benefits (Lareau 2000). Research shows that parents in exam-based systems have few opportunities to negotiate children’s educational experiences (Park 2008; Liang et al. 2013). Yet most countries use exams to select students (Furuta et al. 2016), and parents’ cultural capital continues to play an important role in these educational systems (Byun et al. 2012). How affluent parents activate Received July 21, 2016; revised August 18, 2017, and February 2, 2018; accepted February 28, 2018; electronically published August 27, 2018 Comparative Education Review, vol. 62, no. 4. q 2018 by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved. 0010-4086/2018/6204-0053$10.00 1 See Fan and Chen (2001); Bodovski (2010); Cheadle and Amato (2011); Lareau (2011). Comparative Education Review 000 This content downloaded from 140.109.244.207 on August 29, 2018 21:20:50 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).