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Selling Merit

Scholarship Capture, Hope Trafficking, and the Architecture of Self-Congratulatory Banality in the Internationalisation of Turkish Higher Education

Türkiye's emergence as a leading destination for international students (a roughly ninefold rise in a decade to more than 356,000 students, an estimated US$3 billion in annual revenue, and a state target of 500,000 by 2028) is narrated officially as a triumph of internationalisation and soft power. This paper documents a corruption architecture operating beneath that narrative, which it terms scholarship capture: the diversion of institutional scholarship allocations, mandated as instruments of merit, into a commercial channel in which they function as commission paid in kind to recruitment agencies and are then retailed to self-financing families as discounted tuition misdescribed as merit. Drawing on insider ethnography within the recruitment sector, a corpus of public agency advertising, and official enrolment statistics, the paper reconstructs the mechanism across three converging evidentiary scales. It advances a primary theoretical contribution: self-congratulatory banality, which is an extension of Arendt's account of administrative thoughtlessness in which the functionary is not fearful and obedient but proud and entrepreneurial, experiencing participation in harm as competence. It further argues that hope trafficking, the systematic mis-marketing of opportunity that generates the student volume which earns the scholarship reward, and the post-arrival abandonment of students into conditions of racialised marginalisation are not separate phenomena but the entry and exit wounds of a single incentive, within which the student is neither client nor beneficiary but a bearer instrument whose delivery triggers payment. The analysis is situated within academic capitalism, the sociology of corruption, and the political economy of credential systems, mobilising Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Bourdieu, Fanon, and Akerlof alongside contemporary scholarship. It concludes that the corruption has no orchestrating author; only a drift, structurally generated and ideologically pre-absolved, and proposes a registry-licensing-escrow architecture directed at the design rather than the personnel of the market.