Abstract
This paper seeks to understand the impact of social stratification in higher education. In this paper Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital has been used to construct social classes. The objectives of this paper are to explain the relationship between cultural capital and students' choice of universities, to explore how gender and socio-economic status correlate with the likelihood of applying to public or private universities and to find out the factors which explain why academically qualified students' choice of university differ. The data for this study comes from a sample survey of 372 newly admitted undergraduate students from the University of Dhaka and the BRAC University in Bangladesh. The study finds that male students are more likely to choose public university than female students. Beside this, parents' education and cultural capital play more important role rather than students' cultural capital in students' decisionmaking process.