Education and Class

In today’s on-line/January 11’s print issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mitchell Stevens writes in an op-ed piece on the “admissions race that’s already won”, calling the annual admissions frenzy at selective colleges “essentially ceremonial — an elaborate national ritual of just desserts.” He writes:

The fact that the fates of particular applicants at particular colleges remain uncertain until the end enables us to believe that the winners earn their victories in a fair game. That is how the anxiety that attends the application season is deceptive: It encourages those who experience it to believe that the outcomes of the process are considerably more uncertain than they actually are.

More perniciously perhaps, the feverishness of each year’s application season allows us to take comfort in modest reforms that mostly only tinker with that process. Some recent fixes at selective institutions — eliminating early decision, making the SAT an optional component of applications, or, a bit more radically, proposals to replace individualized selection with a lottery system for all those applicants who meet some general criteria — will do nothing to change the distribution of opportunity that delivers talented applicants to admissions officers in a markedly class-stratified way.

It would be far better if we turned our reformist energies toward improving educational opportunity earlier in life.

I think about this in the context of Harvard’s recent decision to tap its considerable endowment to provide more financial aid for “middle income”families earning less than $180,000 a year. But to the extent that such announcements do increase the number of applicants at Harvard, admissions will become even more competitive, and students from more “modest” backgrounds will be welcomed at Harvard only to the extent that they look like the children of the wealthy donors who make their presence possible.

Stevens argues that genuine equity in college admissions will be attained when we have high quality preschool for all children, generous funding for college prep resources in low-income school districts, and a public that thinks of the needs of children other than their own. Similary, Peter Sacks cautions that colleges like Harvard are motivated mainly by their rankings in the admissions race for a relatively small pool of hyper-qualified applicants and in the end, have little incentive to substantively increase needs-based financial aid.

As long as so many students attend schools that are so ill-equipped to prepare them for college, Harvard and its peers can have it both ways in the “elaborate national ritual” of admissions: getting credit for seeming to do its part in equalizing opportunity while still serving very few students of modest means.

And to the extent that the parents who usher their children through the frenzied process of admissions do think of other people’s children, they can convince themselves that these other children must certainly have had it easier.

And the pernicious ritual continues.

Thanks to the Eduwonkette for her tip to the Chronicle piece.

In today’s Inside Higher Ed, Shari Dinkins offers advice for faculty who teach blue collar students, from flexible deadlines to choices of texts, to seeking ways to experience the real demands of physical labor.

One the one hand, I’m grateful that more people seem to be writing about such things.

On the other hand, I wonder why we still do have to write about such things. Shouldn’t highly educated faculty know that there are things about their first-generation students that they can’t possibly know, and be at least curious enough to ask?

Last week, The Chronicle published a poignant essay by Thomas Benton, a working-class academic who feels, at times, like a “class traitor” in his work at an expensive private college.

The article spurred excellent discussion among Dave, a sociologist; Wes a musician who wrote here and here; and Nathan, another musician, all of whom reflect on their own working class roots and their current work.

The life stories told in the posts and in comments that follow each are well worth a careful read.

From the Huffington Post, this essay by Matthew Schweiger on class-based affirmative action, with examples of programs from UNC Chapel Hill, Amherst, and Harvard.

In Schweiger’s words,

In essence each of these institutions has America’s uncertain future at mind and, ultimately, an equally valuable vision of how to create a stronger democracy as we continue to proceed into the 21st century.

Refreshingly, there’s not yet a barrage of comments about admitting “the underqualifieed” and the inevitable decline of the academy if we started admitting people who could not afford select lacrosse teams or eco-service trips to Costa Rica. But stay tuned…

Karabel’s essay on admissions at elite universities continues to stir some interest among bloggers.

Andrew, at his Union Street blog, responds by invoking Turner’s classic analysis of contest mobility (a presumably open system in which decisions about life trajectories are postponed until relatively late in ones educational career, after multiple opportunities to develop and to demonstrate “merit”) and sponsored mobility (such as the traditional systems of education in Europe, in which the few from the lower classes deemed to have distinctive merit are identified very early and are then sponsored through the system of elite education and eventual employment). He writes:

[A]dmissions processes have become highly, absurdly gamed, such that today even families at the top gnaw with anxiety over whether and how to ensure the best educational futures for their children. Of course, these families have the resources to act on their anxieties, and it’s reflected in the fact that the kids from socioeconomically privileged families aren’t simply coasting into schools on their parents’ backs - we’re not (just) talking about legacy babies here - but are meeting the prevailing standards of academic merit. They’re coming up with high SAT scores and GPAS and compiling the kinds of dazzling extracurricular and service records that college deans and admissions officers salivate over. It’s no big surprise, then, that they’re making it into good schools in spades, while others from the lower socioeconomic tiers rarely do. Still, the competition for status has reached the point that educational strategies now begin at increasingly earlier stages in childrens’ lives: ’saving up for my kid’s college fund’ can no longer be the only thing one does to ensure his or her future.

In contrast, Casey, missed Karabel’s central point about the social problem of qualified students being denied admission because of the limited ways in which “merit” is now measured. Instead, Casey argues that standardized tests are the only way to keep unqualified students out of the best universities and argues, as have others, that “we” must first invest more in the k-12 education of poor kids.

I am amazed at how easy it is for those who defend the growing economic stratification of higher education to slip into the language of pseudo-advocacy for poor and working class kids. In our contradictory public discourse about class, one can advocate –all within the same paragraph — for better schools for poor and working-class kids and for their exclusion from the universities that educate those who will hold the power to decide whether there is any urgency in initiating those reforms. The answer from the graduates of elite universities so far has, of course, been “no”.

When these bursts of advocacy for equitable school reform come mainly in response to arguments that we could at least begin with changes in a deeply flawed system of college admissions, they have to ring pretty hollow to the parents of the kids waiting on the sidelines.

While I should welcome any measure of advocacy for more equitable schooling, it seems infinitely more straightforward to simply accept the challenge of finding ways to screen college applicants by measures of “merit” that go beyond the test scores and extra curricular activities that can be purchased by wealthy parents.

Then, perhaps, with new voices at the table, the discourse about class and opportunity would become more nuanced.