The global diffusion of the graduate school organizational model has shifted the way future academic excellence is identified from a paternalistic master-disciple relationship to a collective organizational decision. 'Eminent men' used to recruit PhD students on the firm belief that they could identify excellence and integrate it in their own…

This article seeks to shed light on current dynamics of stratification in changing higher education and proposes an analytical perspective to account for these dynamics based on Martin Trow's work on "the analysis of status." In research on higher education, the term "stratification" is generally understood as a metaphor that…