Based on an ethnographic study of students attending business schools on scholarship, the following paper deals with the too often forgotten role of economic capital on school prospects. We highlight this role by analyzing the ways in which students of low income families manage to pay school fees. The paying of school fees calls for a particular mobilization from families, whose analysis enables us to examine the way these families are structured by economic bonds. These instances of economic mobilization by the families for educational purposes take place within families’ strategies for social promotion. This allows us to question the notion of the contemporary private sphere as recentered on affective bonds that would go hand in hand with the increasing part played by the school system in determining social positions.