Piketty's Capital has created enormous interest around the world, not least in educational circles. One reason for this may be his readiness to refer, in a book largely focused on economic history, to the ways that education has, and might, contribute to better and more equal social outcomes. This article welcomes this, but argues that Piketty's suggestions remain somewhat limited due to his adherence to a more or less distributional, rather than relational, approach, and it sets out to address this issue by arguing that the assumption it is the distribution of credentials that accounts for their contribution is mistaken. Instead, it advances arguments which recognize the separate contributions of the content of credentials, and their valorization. The main focus of the paper is thus on the different ways that educational credentials are realized, which, it is argued, is a major basis for the maintenance of educational inequality