Who are the academic elite? A methodological propsal

Abstract

The term elite is frequently used in higher education to refer to universities, students, and academics with significant power and influence. However, many studies overlook the conceptual and methodological debates on how to identify elite groups in higher education. This article proposes a conceptual and methodological framework for identifying elite academics, illustrated through the case of the economics discipline in Chile. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of field and employing latent class analysis (LCA), it offers a systematic, replicable, and empirically grounded method for mapping academic elites. The implications of this approach are discussed in the conclusions.