This paper synthesizes the results of a survey made in nine prestige schools in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Among them, there are confessional, bilingual, public schools and also "alternative" expression used in the sixties for innovative pedagogic projects that emphasized the freedom and autonomy in the students' formation schools. The empiric material we produced offers a panorama regarding the family and school practices that feed themselves in the production of successful institutional paths, on the part of most of the youths that enter and stay at those schools. This is a process of conversion and reconversion of cultural, economical, social, symbolic, academic... capitals quite consistent with the hypothesis of a "virtuous circle", that is, of an optimization of the processes of construction of the teaching quality, in the investigated institutions.
institutional trajectories; teaching quality; prestige schools; social capital