Will Brehm 0:24
Karen Lillie, welcome to FreshEd.

Karen Lillie  1:45
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Will Brehm  1:47
So, can you describe for listeners, the Leysin American School? What does it look like?

Karen Lillie  1:53
Yeah. So, let’s start with its geographic location. So, LAS, as it’s referred to, is in a French speaking part of Switzerland, which is broadly in the Lake Geneva region. I think the best way to paint a picture of its location is to describe how I would get to the school. So, I would fly into Geneva, take a two-hour train ride around the lake to the other end, and then switch to a cog train, whose line was built at the end of the 19th century, and which goes up the Bernese mountain. The Bernese mountain is part of the Bernese Alps. So, we’re already in the Alpine region of Switzerland in the French speaking part. Then after 30 minutes and 1,500 meters on this cog train, I’d arrive in a small ski village of Leysin. Leysin, as I said, is a small ski village, has around 3,500 people, one post office, one bank, a small handful of grocery stores, and LAS. So, in terms of its campus, LAS is composed of 12 buildings which have a combination of dormitories, sports and arts facilities, eating spaces and classrooms of course. It’s not a closed campus. So, there are no gates around it. To get from one building to the next you would walk along the main road, which winds through the village. So, it has a very kind of open feel to it. Again, we’re in the Alps. So, whenever you look out from the buildings, you look onto a beautiful vista of mountains. You can also kind of look over the valley below you. It’s really idyllic, a really picturesque setting I would say. In terms of the architecture, it’s very Swiss. So, LAS’ main building, what’s called the Belle Epoque, was built in the late 19th century as a sanatorium. The village was essentially a place where a lot of people went for tuberculosis cures at the time. And so, the school still retains a lot of that architectural character. So, think huge sun facing balconies, good circulation of the fresh mountain air, grand entryways. And then that cog train that I described, the last stop of that train is actually in the back of the school. It’s sort of like a private entrance into the school. So, the rich and famous could come and go from the sanatorium without being seen. Okay, so that’s the physicality of the school. In terms of the students LAS educates around 330 young men and women from the ages of 12 to 18. And they come from about 40 different nationalities. It offers the International Baccalaureate and also the US high school degree. So, despite its name, the Leysin American school, it’s really an international school, both in terms of its international curriculum, and in terms of the students that are there. Those students are not only international, but they’re also very, very wealthy.

Will Brehm  4:44
How much does it cost to go to LAS?

Karen Lillie  4:46
Yeah, that’s a great question. So, LAS is reputedly one of the most expensive schools in the world. The annual fee for this last academic year for the 2021 academic year was 99,000 Swiss Francs, which is about 80,000 pounds per year.

Will Brehm  5:00
Oh my gosh!

Karen Lillie  5:01
Yeah, it’s crazy. And then there are annual expenses on top of that. So, you have things like the health plans, sports equipment, school supplies, tutoring, uniforms, transporters to and from the airport, which all adds up to something like 120,000 Swiss Francs per year, which is something like 95,000 pounds.

Will Brehm  5:20
Oh, my gosh. So, the children that go to this school must come from families that are extremely wealthy.

Karen Lillie  5:27
Extremely wealthy. Yes. That’s what we’re talking about. And so, this may seem shocking. It was certainly shocking to me. But what’s perhaps even more shocking is that this is actually rather typical of Swiss boarding schools. So, if you Google something like the most expensive schools in the world, usually the top 10 or so are all in Switzerland. So, this is typical of the region that LAS is in.

Will Brehm  5:56
Why is that though? Why does Switzerland have such a high number of expensive schools?

Karen Lillie  6:02
Yeah, that’s a very good question. So, I think part of it is that this is the reputation that has come to be there. So, that schools can get away with charging more and more, because they’re all doing it. And because this label of Swiss boarding school has come to mean something and particularly, it’s come to mean something to wealthy families all over the world. And they tend to see Switzerland as a place where they can send their children because it’s stable, it’s safe, it’s perhaps a little bit boring. It comes with this sense of, I can send my child there and they will be fine. And they can send their money there. So, it tends to be a way to start moving their children and their money out of other places of the world into a safe democratic location where they can then kind of springboard on to the next location.

Will Brehm  6:52
Right. And Swiss banking laws, if I understand it, they allow for secrecy, which perhaps the super wealthy want?

Karen Lillie  7:00
Yeah. So that’s actually starting to be dismantled. So, I think starting in 2018, the Banking Secrecy Act was starting to get dismantled under international pressure. But Switzerland still certainly has that reputation. And prior to 2018, there was very strict Swiss secrecy laws. So, yes, this is certainly part of the story.

Will Brehm  7:22
Yeah, right. You can move your money there and your children, and it’s all sort of safe and secret.

Karen Lillie  7:28
Exactly. And who doesn’t love the Alps?

Will Brehm  7:31
Yeah. I mean, it sounds absolutely beautiful. So, you worked at this school? Can you tell us a little bit about what your job was?

Karen Lillie  7:39
Yes. So, I worked there as a college guidance counselor, which means that I helped graduating students with their college applications. But this being a boarding school, I also lived in one of the girls’ dorms, and was responsible for looking after those girls, one night a week and also on the weekends. I also chaperoned school trips and events, went to student performances and sports games. I was basically a member of the community.

Will Brehm  8:07
So, in your time there, how would you describe a typical day for one of these 100 or 330 students, which seems like a rather small group of students to be in high school, more or less?

Karen Lillie  8:22
Yeah, it is a rather small group. I’d say, very personalized attention that they received. So, a typical day for a student would essentially be they would wake up in the morning, as I said, it’s a boarding school so they’re all living in dormitories. The dormitories are single sex. There are usually two to four students per room. So, they would wake up in the morning, probably, say hi to their roommates. Get ready for the day, get into their uniforms, all students wear uniforms. The uniforms can of course be accessorized. So, often girls would wear very nice Cartier jewelry, had very nice Burberry scarves, you know, designer, let’s say Chanel handbags, which is a lovely sight but also a little bit funny when you think about these students being educated in the Swiss Alps. They would get ready for the day. They would have to tidy their rooms. They could get in trouble if their bed wasn’t made, or if their room was too messy. And then they would go off to class. And classes would run until the midafternoon, there would be a break for lunch, obviously. And then after classes, there would be extracurricular activities. So, things like sports or performance activities, community service, etc. They would then have dinner either in the cafeteria or they could go into the village for dinner. And then they’d have to check back into the dormitories at a particular time. At that point, they would have study hall, which is hypothetically when they will get their homework done. And then after that, they’d have free time to essentially wind down hang out with each other, catch up before then going to bed. In the winter, the schedule changes a little bit because as I said, this is a ski village. So, Tuesdays and Thursdays would be half-days. There would be classes in the morning and skiing time in the afternoons.

Will Brehm  10:07
Wow! how refined and nice. And so, do all 330 students live on campus? Do they all dorm?

Karen Lillie  10:15
Yes, they all dorm. There are technically a few exceptions, which would be basically the students of staff members who then live with their parents. And then technically they’re not kind of in the dorms, although a lot of times the parents live in the dorms. And so, they’re anyway living in the dorms just with a parent.

Will Brehm  10:32
Right? Okay. And does the school offer scholarships? Like, are there students that do not come from families of the super wealthy there?

Karen Lillie  10:41
There are a few. There are not very many. So, typically, there would be something like two scholarship students per year group. I would say those students, some of them would come from poor areas, if you could say. So, for example, there’s a student who came from essentially a farming community in Southeast Asia. So, that was clearly a not very well resourced student. But then there are other students who would come from what I would more consider kind of global middle class standing from families who wouldn’t have enough money to send their child to LAS, but weren’t necessarily like out of resources. But the scholarship students, I think, from the interviews that I had with scholarship students, I would say that they had a difficult time socially at LAS. A lot of socialization revolved around activities that costs something. So, going out to eat, for example. In Switzerland, it’s incredibly expensive to go out to eat. And students were typically doing this maybe on a nightly basis. And scholarship students just can’t keep up with that. Also, for example, students could travel on the weekends. And so, for a lot of students that meant just flying somewhere. Sometimes taking their private plane somewhere, and staying in a very expensive hotel for a weekend. Which again, the scholarship students just can’t afford that. Which means that they were a lot of times left out of that kind of general social milieu. So, I think for them their time at LAS was rather different than it was for students who could socialize with money.

Will Brehm  12:17
Right? There was a distinction between students based on, in a sense, class.

Karen Lillie  12:21
Yes.

Will Brehm  12:22
And so, you said the name of the school is the Leysin American School, but you are saying that there are students from many different nationalities? Can you give me a little bit of the history of why the school was founded, and perhaps why the word American is in the name of the actual school?

Karen Lillie  12:42
Yeah. So, it’s a fascinating history. So, LAS was founded in 1961, by a man named Fred Ott, who was actually Swiss. But he emigrated to the US at age 10 and then eventually returned to Switzerland in his 50’s, which was when he then founded the school. In its early years, LAS was an American curriculum school that was designed for the sons and daughters of overseas Americans. It was essentially kind of positioned in the intersection of American foreign policy and education, which was very much informed at the time by Cold War interests. So, if we think about the early 1960s, that was basically the reigning discourse. This was all about the Cold War at the time. So, essentially, the question of how it came to be that LAS ended up as LAS in Switzerland is very complicated. But essentially, Fred, LAS’ founder, he was born in a German speaking part of Switzerland in 1914. Then when he emigrated to the US, he eventually earned a university degree in Germanistics and philosophy. This is important because it means then when World War II broke out, Fred was a German speaker and scholar in the US and he was apparently asked by his boss at the time, whether he was a communist or a Nazi. And he was told that they worried about him in the community. So, you really got the sense that this was a really difficult background to have at that time in the US. In 1944, he was then drafted into the war. He was first assigned to a prisoner of war camp in the US for captured German troops. And then he was transferred to the Office of  Military Government for Germany. So, basically, in the span of just a few years, he was a native German speaker, first in America at war, and then in the US Armed Forces in Germany. So, yeah, this again, was like a very complicated identity to have, one can imagine. And it gives context to the identity that he then really constructed and maintained throughout the rest of his life, which you see in all of the documents. Which is basically that he constructed an identity as a very outwardly patriotic American, which again, given this background makes a lot of sense. And that helps piece together why he would open an American school in his home country, Switzerland. And even more interestingly, why he really connected it to American Cold War interests? So, again, from the historical documents, you can see that LAS was originally marketed to what C. Wright Mills at the time called the “power elite”. And so, these were the corporate officers, the statesman, and the military leaders who were connected to Cold War interests

Will Brehm  15:05
That were having to live in Switzerland.

Karen Lillie  15:23
Yeah. So, at the time, the students were American students, but they lived all over the world. So, not necessarily in Switzerland. They a lot of times were posted in Europe but also, a lot of times, we’re essentially anywhere in the world looking for an American school abroad.

Will Brehm  15:40
So, in a sense, it has always historically been for the elite sort of class in the world and  just so happened in the beginning to be focused on sort of an American elite class.

Karen Lillie  15:52
Exactly.

Will Brehm  15:53
And so, were fees always high? When I hear 90,000 pounds, or something now, I think that’s astronomical. Was it astronomically high back in the 60s and 70s?

Karen Lillie  16:04
Interestingly, no. So, in the beginning, the price was still high, but it was rather comparable to what you would imagine the American boarding schools to charge. So, it kind of positioned itself with those kinds of schools -with the regular American boarding schools, just happened to be abroad. And over time, it shifted, which is also an interesting story. Basically, the Cold War essentially morphed into international capitalism. So, by the 1970s, the US was losing geopolitical power, but pursuing economic unilateralism that eventually helped it become the financial leader of the capitalist world. And as this shift was happening, LAS was handed down from father to son, and then that next generation of leadership slowly reoriented the school from an American elite to a global financial elite, which was essentially a strategic response to this changing landscape.

Will Brehm  17:06
So, when did you start seeing this change away from the American elite to this sort of transnational elite?

Karen Lillie  17:13
So, it started slowly happening in the 1980s, which is essentially, when neoliberalism was starting to take hold. Then, I would say after 1991, when countries were starting to open up and starting to liberalize trade, that was when LAS really committed itself to this sense of becoming international and to bringing in students, particularly from what were then the Post-Soviet countries, with families who had money who were looking to essentially move out of those countries.

Will Brehm  17:46
And so today, how would you describe the demographics? You said, that it was very multinational but do you have better statistics on what the actual demographics are of the school in terms of nationality?

Karen Lillie  17:58
Yeah. So, by 2011, which is essentially, when my historical work on the school kind of ended, LAS was 12% American, in which, earlier, it was something like 98% of Americans, if we’re thinking about the 1960s and 1970s. So, this is a huge shift. Even more interesting is that Americans were at that point, the second largest group behind Russians, who were at the time 14% of the student body. So, if you think of a school that was originally designed to serve the American Cold War, this is quite a change. It’s not dominated by any one particular nationality, not even close. So, the top five nationalities in order are Russian, American, Chinese, Mexican, and Brazilian, and those five constitute only 52% of the student body. That’s pretty unique for elite schools. So, elite schools are often tasked with basically creating the future elite of a particular country, usually the country in which that elite school is housed. LAS then is rather a different kind of elite school because it’s not producing the future elite of any one particular country, but really looking then at bringing an international cross section of the elite together, and then hypothetically launching them into an even more globally mobile future.

Will Brehm  19:18
Let’s talk a little bit about the student futures because that’s an interesting sort of phenomenon to think through and I know your research has actually looked at this specifically. So, how do LAS students who are multinational, who are -aside from the few scholarship students- from families at the absolute top wealthy elite globally, how do these students even begin to understand and perceive their futures?

Karen Lillie  19:46
That’s a great question. I would say in general, the students envision their futures as part of the globally mobile elite and they really saw each other as facilitating that future. So, I can give the example of Tanya who is a student. And all of these names are pseudonyms. And she basically told me that LAS allowed her to cultivate global business networks through her classmates. So, she felt like she had more in common with the other international, wealthy young people at the school than with people who were still in her home country but who didn’t share the same economic background. So, she essentially saw LAS as a springboard to a globally mobile future because it allowed her to build these connections with similarly wealthy peers. But it would say that, although LAS advertises creating citizens of the world, this is part of their motto, the students seem to interpret this sense of global mobility rather narrowly. So, they focused on moving to the English speaking global north, particularly to the US or the UK, because of the association that those countries have with essentially global status, and therefore also with the maintenance of their own status. And it gets complicated because that association with global status, is of course, a legacy of British colonialism, on the one hand, and also, as I discussed earlier, the US’ shift from leading the Cold War to essentially leading the capitalist world. So, in many ways, how would these students envision their future can be seen as reinforcing the global flows of power that kind of led to their elite status in the first place, rather than reflecting the sense of true global mobility, which I think is what the school tends to advertise and maybe also would want these students to really take on?

Will Brehm  21:30
Yeah. It’s fascinating given the historic context in which this school was founded. In many ways, it is achieving the original intent of the school, right? To train or to keep the American elite in a sense at that pinnacle. And now even though the nationalities might be different of these students, they still are desiring that sort of American or UK sort of status and “eliteness” in a way. And so, in many ways that history is, as you say, sort of driving the present, even though they have a motto that is slightly different, and perhaps has a different intention.

Karen Lillie  22:05
Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s an excellent point.

Will Brehm  22:07
And so, there’s the motto of creating world citizens, or citizens of the world but does LAS do anything that actually shapes these students perceptions of the future? And their perceptions of being in an elite class, other than say, the networks that students create during their time there, the dinners they go to in the evenings? I mean, how else does LAS actually shape these perceptions?

Karen Lillie  22:33
Yeah. So, I would say, interestingly, which is not what I would have expected, I think LAS really takes a “laissez faire” approach to the whole thing. So, the school is, of course, bringing these students together under one roof which does a lot in itself to kind of cultivate these networks and to get students thinking about mobile futures. Also, in its marketing materials, you can see that this is something that they emphasize. They talk about alumni traveling all over the world, they use synonyms for the world, over and over, like the whole planet, the world, every continent, you know, they try to find every different way you can say this, use that in the marketing materials. But I think on the ground, the reality is that those students are really kind of left to themselves to think about what this means for them, and how they connect to each other, and how they want to move forward.

I will say, though, that, as you mentioned very astutely, the fact that it is an American school in name and also that a lot of the school structure is still American. So, basically, the class scheduling is very American. There’s a GPA system, which is very American, grade point average system. There were things like prom, senior skip day, lots of American traditions that found their way into the school. And so, in that way, I think LAS in some ways, brings students together from around the world and in other ways, emphasizes this sense of being national in the sense of having an affiliation with a particular nation. And my feeling is that the students understood that to mean that they can also then be national in their own ways. And that if this school can be an American school, I can retain my affiliation with my nation because that’s essentially acceptable here. This is not truly an international space. This is a space where international people come together to be educated in a particular way.

Will Brehm  24:33
That’s quite fascinating. So, what you’re saying in a sense is that this multinational student body that’s coming into this school that is supposed to be about creating globally mobile elite is actually also at the same time sort of reinforcing national identity from which those students come from. So, can you tell me what sort of conceptions of national identity and patriotism to one’s nation did you uncover from some of these students?

Karen Lillie  25:03
Yeah. So, I think it’s a really interesting question. And I think an interesting finding that came out of this work that I was doing. So, students, as I said, they were becoming very nationalistic. And I say becoming, because a lot of them told me that it was at LAS that they felt like, “Oh, yeah, I really am American”, or whatever it might be. And I think it’s because these students were confronted with national diversity. And then they see that they are not like someone from another place. They are like people from their place, whatever that place might be. And then a sense of nationalism really informed how these students would interact with each other. So, for example, it would influence their friend groups in really stark ways. The friend groups were often defined by nationalities or even more so by language groups. In some ways, this is understandable, because especially as a teenager, you feel more comfortable speaking your own language, maybe you feel more comfortable with people who are like you. But for a school that relies on being international and relies on this sense of creating citizens of the world for its marketing, you would think that this kind of homogeny would not necessarily be so prevalent in that kind of space. But the friend groups were then used to signal how a student positions themselves. And this is often taken to mean into political ways. So, an example is a Chinese student, who told me that another student who was from Hong Kong wasn’t respecting his Chinese identity because he was in a British social group at LAS. Never mind that that student also had a UK passport, and also had ties to the UK. So, in a lot of ways, the students were positioning both themselves and each other according to these geopolitics, at the same time that they were meant to become so called citizens of the world.

Will Brehm  26:56
And it seems like in a way, they’re both right? It’s sort of cultivating a particular national identity that, to some extent, is rather superficial. And it’s being created because it’s being defined in relation to the other students. And perhaps if they went to a different school, their national identity would look potentially different. And at the same time, they’re sort of being shaped into this global elite class that actually shares a lot of similarities despite their perceived national differences.

Karen Lillie  27:29
Yeah. I think that’s a really nice way of understanding it. And I think that when we say becoming citizens of the world, I think this is a term that’s thrown around a lot. And that has become sort of a buzzword, and basically, every international school refers to creating citizens of the world. But I think what we see when you really talk to the students is that they are becoming citizens, but in a globalized world, and particularly in a globalized economic world. And so, I think it’s not necessarily mutually exclusive. I think that these students can be nationalistic at the same time that they are looking at globally mobile futures. And that becoming globally mobile doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t consider yourself to be part of a particular country, or that you don’t carry with you the resonances of geopolitics that you’ve probably grown up with. So, I think these two things are interconnected.

Will Brehm  28:24
Yeah. They seem to be in tension, but they exist simultaneously.

Karen Lillie  28:29
Yea, basically.

Will Brehm  28:29
And so, what does some of this research you’ve been doing on LAS tell us about the idea of a transnational capitalist class, which has become an idea that we’re seeing more and more and particularly in connection to elite schooling as partly forming the transnational capitalist class? What does your research in a sense say about this class formation?

Karen Lillie  28:53
Yeah. So, the literature basically says that forming a transnational elite class requires shared interests. And those shared interests are often in mobility, global opportunities, wealth accumulation on a global scale, which then give rise to a sense of class commonality. And I think that the case of LAS shows that these shared interests can also coexist with real power relations that are enacted within an elite group. And that that then also has effects in terms of whether you can consider this a social class, or whether this is rather just a group of young people who share some interests but don’t really share this sense of commonality. And so, basically, what this means is that probably different kinds of elite schools fill different kinds of roles when it comes to transnational class formation. And probably some schools are engaging with these processes in some moments, but not other moments. And that when schools serve a national elite, they might function in a different way than schools like LAS that serve the cross section of the international elite, which essentially just means that -I think what this research shows is that it’s very complex and it’s multifaceted and that I think we probably need a lot more research in this area, because I think it’s a fascinating area, and one that has a lot of layers to it.

Will Brehm  30:16
Yeah. I just think it’s so fascinating because it does reflect particular histories, it does reflect particular moments of sort of economic and political power. And this gets reflected in these elite schools and like you’re saying in different ways depending on what type of elite school. It’s just such a fascinating topic to sort of read through a lot of these much larger processes at work across the globe. So, Karen Lillie, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. It just was an absolute pleasure to talk today and best of luck with your postdoc.

Karen Lillie  30:48
Thank you. And thank you for having me.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

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Practices of Consumption: Cohesion and Distinction within a Globally Wealthy Group

Mobile and elite: diaspora as a strategy for status maintenance in transitions to higher education

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