Academic policy in Europe currently emphasizes efficiency and high performance along with ‘flexible entrepreneurialism’ and creativity in ways that can appear to be both contradictive and double edged on several levels in academic institutions (Ball, 2012; Bendix Petersen, 2009). The present paper relates to this aspect of higher education policy. It is based on a study with 52 research students on different doctoral programs in Education Sciences at six Swedish universities and asks questions about how these doctoral students understand, cope with and challenge different demands in their research education and what kind of relationship they have with their research supervisors. Supervisors constitute institutional and relational social capital in a double sense and are vital for how the research students' bond and link resources in research education (Putnam, 2001). As the data and analysis shows, in fact the students create directions and legitimacy in different practises (Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998) depending on the kind of social capital they have or gain access to: institutional or relational, individual-competitive or collective-horizontal and their social capital is thus related to what they can share collectively, such as in conferences, seminars and teaching. These activities help them to develop exchange and bonding value and form bridges between interests and networks; either horizontal or more vertical ones (e.g. influential contacts). Depending on the ‘academic value’ of the social capital of a research supervisor we see that these research students get access to specific and more or less ‘advantageous’ paths. Also, it appears as if social capital is unevenly shared and distributed between groups and individuals and is specifically related to gender (Moren Cross and Lin, 2008). This creates unequal conditions for men and women research students in research education.