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Class Warfare: Class, Race, and College Admissions in Top-Tier Secondary Schools
Stories abound about the lengths to which middle- and upper-middle-class parents will go to ensure a spot for their child at a prestigious university. From the Suzuki method to calculus-based physics, from AP tests all the way back to early-learning Kumon courses, students are increasingly pushed to excel with that Harvard or Yale acceptance letter held tantalizingly in front of them. And nowhere is this drive more apparent than in our elite secondary schools. In Class Warfare, Lois Weis, Kristin Cipollone, and Heather Jenkins go inside the ivy-yearning halls of three such schools to offer a day-to-day, week-by-week look at this remarkable drive toward college admissions and one of its most salient to determine class. Drawing on deep and sustained contact with students, parents, teachers, and administrators at three iconic secondary schools in the United States, the authors unveil a formidable process of class positioning at the heart of the college admissions process. They detail the ways students and parents exploit every opportunity and employ every bit of cultural, social, and economic capital they can in order to gain admission into a “Most Competitive” or “Highly Competitive Plus” university. Moreover, they show how admissions into these schools—with their attendant rankings—are used to lock in or improve class standing for the next generation. It’s a story of class warfare within a given class, the substrata of which—whether economically, racially, or socially determined—are fiercely negotiated through the college admissions process.In a historic moment marked by deep economic uncertainty, anxieties over socioeconomic standing are at their highest. Class, as this book shows, must be won, and the collateral damage of this aggressive pursuit may just be education itself, flattened into a mere victory banner.
304 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2014
67 people want to read
About the author
Lois Weis
41 books4 followersDr. Weis is author, co-author or editor of numerous books and articles that focus on race, class and gender in American schools.
Dr. Weis is Past President of the American Educational Studies Association and is on the editorial boards of several journals, including Educational Policy, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education and Review of Educational Research.
Dr. Weis was awarded the rank of SUNY Distinguished Professor, the highest faculty rank in the State University of New York system. The award recognizes full professors of national or international prominence for outstanding achievement in research and scholarship. In addition, Weis and co-author Michelle Fine received the 2006 Critic Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association for their book, Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, Race, and Gender in United States School.
Dr. Weis is Past President of the American Educational Studies Association and is on the editorial boards of several journals, including Educational Policy, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education and Review of Educational Research.
Dr. Weis was awarded the rank of SUNY Distinguished Professor, the highest faculty rank in the State University of New York system. The award recognizes full professors of national or international prominence for outstanding achievement in research and scholarship. In addition, Weis and co-author Michelle Fine received the 2006 Critic Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association for their book, Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, Race, and Gender in United States School.
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December 30, 2015
One of the defining ideas that I think about often is something I learnt from one of the books in my ‘behavioural economics’ shelf (can’t for the life of me remember which one). It was based on a story about a group of people studying medicine being asked about their fellow students and why they were studying medicine. The people asked would say, ‘well, it’s obvious, Mary ought to be a doctor, everything about her tells you she should would be the ideal doctor, in fact, it is impossible to imagine her being anything else’. All well and good. But then the researchers asked these same people, 'so, what about you?' And invariably they said something like, ‘I know, right. What about me… I couldn’t really tell you how I’ve ended up here. I sort of jumped into what looked like a stream a while ago and suddenly I ended up in a river and I’ve been more or less swept along ever since.’ Others have ‘essential’ traits, we have contingent ones. Others are what they were meant to be, we are endlessly complex and uncertain because of it. Most bad things in the world that end in –ism (racism, ageism, sexism, classism) are sustained by just these perspectives. We can group entire nations of people, entire religions that exist over endless nations so that they are ‘all the same’ and then collectively blame each individual in these groups, and all individuals in them collectively for the actions of any member of ‘them’ (just look at how we talk about Muslims), but the most hideous excesses and abuses of power by us are invariably portrayed as a kind of mistake caused fundamentally by our good, if somewhat misplaced intentions.
I thought about this a lot while reading this book. The reason being that this book looks at those who ought to be considered the real winners in our society – those who go to the most elite schools and therefore are likely to move from them into the ruling circles of our societies. How they think of, define and justify their advantage in what is supposed to be a ‘meritocracy’ is obviously something I find endlessly fascinating. But this wasn’t the only thing this book looks at. It also looks much more closely at what our education system does to these children. The point being that there is an ever diminishing pool of ‘good jobs’ out there and lots and lots of people doing whatever it takes to elbow their way into those jobs. The first thing that is necessary is to get into a good school – not necessarily so that you get a better education per se, but rather that you will get the benefits that come via association. These schools have ‘names’ and so just attending provides benefits. That is not to say that attending is all that is necessary. The meritocracy myth is a complex one. It requires hard work, but it is a myth in the sense that hard work alone won’t get you to the top.
It requires you to do the hardest possible subjects at school, though – even though you will probably never use any of the knowledge required to succeed in those subjects, subjects such as Latin or the hardest mathematics – but these subjects are not prized for their content, but rather for their ability to confer distinction. To succeed in such subjects requires hard work, dedication and application – but it also requires you to attend schools with the best teachers, access to additional assistance from tutors, and most importantly of all, to be in a social location where the effort involved in learning a dead language or esoteric mathematics has some standing and some hope of providing a pathway to somewhere. Something that is utterly improbable from most other social locations.
The point this book makes is that we often look at the winners in our society as if they too were all one class. That is, as if their success were completely assured and effortless. This book makes it clear that this is not the case. Not because some of them fail, but rather that these schools, these ‘best of’ schools have limited places and so they are seeking to provide something of a diverse experience for the students that do attend. This book mentions Stevens’ book ‘Creating a Class’, particularly in relation to how these schools seek to recruit their student populations. As Stevens points out, this often means seeking to have as many people of colour and students from as diverse a range of US states (and potentially overseas students) as the school can manage. The problems this might cause for these students, often therefore assumed to have been let in for the wrong reasons, and therefore also of having kept out more 'people like us', can hardly help make these schools comfortable places for those marked ‘other’. Thus the paradoxes of such admission policies.
And so it proves. These schools are almost exclusively for the very wealthy white students. For others attending these schools this creates a very difficult environment. As one student said in this, it is hard to invite fellow students to your house when you can’t ‘accommodate’ them in the same way there as they can at theirs. This creates entire groups of ‘outsiders within’, but is particularly true of people of colour. People who often see themselves as 'more white' by the time the leave the school. It was interesting that lunch tables were talked about as being like something out of Apartheid South Africa – but other books I’ve read seem to imply this form of segregation is virtually universal in the US.
The last chapter of this book (not the epilogue, which I’ll get to in a minute) is probably the chapter that I found most interesting. It is the chapter that points out the problems with the whole idea of creating socially elite schooling utterly focused on creating social advantage through education in a market that is so precarious. This is questioned for a range of reasons – not least the harm it does to so many children (even among these ‘winners’) but also because the costs of such an education (that is, the literal monetary costs) are so huge and the likelihood of gaining the sort of social advantage such an education previously guaranteed have become so slight that the authors suspect something will eventually have to give. It is very hard to know if this is the case or not – people persist in doing what ‘has always worked’ for a very long time after it has stopped working. As someone said somewhere, a town is a very good thing to build beside a river, a city is a very bad thing to build beside a river - unfortunately, towns become cities. The looming college-debt crisis in the US is surely going to have some impact on education – though, admittedly, it is much more likely to have impacts lower down the caste system than those discussed here.
The epilogue was really worthwhile. Too few books that report on research ever mention the messiness of their research process, how the research was actually conducted, how the data was analysed or collated or puzzled over. The advantages and disadvantages of the researchers own backgrounds is something else that is very rarely mentioned. This epilogue does exactly that, and as such is a bit of an exemplar for how such a discussion ought to be presented in a book of this sort. Lois Weis is something of a god – I’ve read other books by her and they are invariably and consistently brilliant. This was likewise up to her usual, absurdly high standard.
Oh, just one other thing I meant to mention. In Reay’s wonderful book Class Work (yes, there is a bit of a theme going on here with the use of ‘class’ and all of its synonym meanings in these titles) she says that ‘parent’ invariably means ‘mother’ in relation to school work. But what was interesting here was that often both parents sought to be interviewed about their role in creating their child’s distinctive educational pathway and in giving them ‘something to bring to the table’ so as to allow them access to these most elite schools. I found that particularly interesting and not something I would have been able to guess beforehand. It looks like Lareau’s ‘concerted cultivation’ is increasingly requiring the dedicated attention of both parents.
I thought about this a lot while reading this book. The reason being that this book looks at those who ought to be considered the real winners in our society – those who go to the most elite schools and therefore are likely to move from them into the ruling circles of our societies. How they think of, define and justify their advantage in what is supposed to be a ‘meritocracy’ is obviously something I find endlessly fascinating. But this wasn’t the only thing this book looks at. It also looks much more closely at what our education system does to these children. The point being that there is an ever diminishing pool of ‘good jobs’ out there and lots and lots of people doing whatever it takes to elbow their way into those jobs. The first thing that is necessary is to get into a good school – not necessarily so that you get a better education per se, but rather that you will get the benefits that come via association. These schools have ‘names’ and so just attending provides benefits. That is not to say that attending is all that is necessary. The meritocracy myth is a complex one. It requires hard work, but it is a myth in the sense that hard work alone won’t get you to the top.
It requires you to do the hardest possible subjects at school, though – even though you will probably never use any of the knowledge required to succeed in those subjects, subjects such as Latin or the hardest mathematics – but these subjects are not prized for their content, but rather for their ability to confer distinction. To succeed in such subjects requires hard work, dedication and application – but it also requires you to attend schools with the best teachers, access to additional assistance from tutors, and most importantly of all, to be in a social location where the effort involved in learning a dead language or esoteric mathematics has some standing and some hope of providing a pathway to somewhere. Something that is utterly improbable from most other social locations.
The point this book makes is that we often look at the winners in our society as if they too were all one class. That is, as if their success were completely assured and effortless. This book makes it clear that this is not the case. Not because some of them fail, but rather that these schools, these ‘best of’ schools have limited places and so they are seeking to provide something of a diverse experience for the students that do attend. This book mentions Stevens’ book ‘Creating a Class’, particularly in relation to how these schools seek to recruit their student populations. As Stevens points out, this often means seeking to have as many people of colour and students from as diverse a range of US states (and potentially overseas students) as the school can manage. The problems this might cause for these students, often therefore assumed to have been let in for the wrong reasons, and therefore also of having kept out more 'people like us', can hardly help make these schools comfortable places for those marked ‘other’. Thus the paradoxes of such admission policies.
And so it proves. These schools are almost exclusively for the very wealthy white students. For others attending these schools this creates a very difficult environment. As one student said in this, it is hard to invite fellow students to your house when you can’t ‘accommodate’ them in the same way there as they can at theirs. This creates entire groups of ‘outsiders within’, but is particularly true of people of colour. People who often see themselves as 'more white' by the time the leave the school. It was interesting that lunch tables were talked about as being like something out of Apartheid South Africa – but other books I’ve read seem to imply this form of segregation is virtually universal in the US.
The last chapter of this book (not the epilogue, which I’ll get to in a minute) is probably the chapter that I found most interesting. It is the chapter that points out the problems with the whole idea of creating socially elite schooling utterly focused on creating social advantage through education in a market that is so precarious. This is questioned for a range of reasons – not least the harm it does to so many children (even among these ‘winners’) but also because the costs of such an education (that is, the literal monetary costs) are so huge and the likelihood of gaining the sort of social advantage such an education previously guaranteed have become so slight that the authors suspect something will eventually have to give. It is very hard to know if this is the case or not – people persist in doing what ‘has always worked’ for a very long time after it has stopped working. As someone said somewhere, a town is a very good thing to build beside a river, a city is a very bad thing to build beside a river - unfortunately, towns become cities. The looming college-debt crisis in the US is surely going to have some impact on education – though, admittedly, it is much more likely to have impacts lower down the caste system than those discussed here.
The epilogue was really worthwhile. Too few books that report on research ever mention the messiness of their research process, how the research was actually conducted, how the data was analysed or collated or puzzled over. The advantages and disadvantages of the researchers own backgrounds is something else that is very rarely mentioned. This epilogue does exactly that, and as such is a bit of an exemplar for how such a discussion ought to be presented in a book of this sort. Lois Weis is something of a god – I’ve read other books by her and they are invariably and consistently brilliant. This was likewise up to her usual, absurdly high standard.
Oh, just one other thing I meant to mention. In Reay’s wonderful book Class Work (yes, there is a bit of a theme going on here with the use of ‘class’ and all of its synonym meanings in these titles) she says that ‘parent’ invariably means ‘mother’ in relation to school work. But what was interesting here was that often both parents sought to be interviewed about their role in creating their child’s distinctive educational pathway and in giving them ‘something to bring to the table’ so as to allow them access to these most elite schools. I found that particularly interesting and not something I would have been able to guess beforehand. It looks like Lareau’s ‘concerted cultivation’ is increasingly requiring the dedicated attention of both parents.
December 25, 2014
I'm afraid I lack the patience to document all that is disappointing about this book. I get to two stars only because it does a good job of describing the social interactions across racial groups in three above average public and private high schools.
To begin with, the book is poorly written, laden with jargon and extraordinarily repetitious. It also superimposes a concept of class struggle on the college process which is never documented by footnotes. There are a lot of statements about what people value and how they behave that are simply assumed. Most of what is covered in the book seems obvious to me -- we are, even fifty years after the Civil Rights movement, in a racist society. We are also in a culture increasingly dominated and controlled by the very rich. How can we expect high schools to transcend the pressures engendered by these realities?
The authors have a minimal understanding of how college admissions works. They rely heavily on the Barron's guide and its college ratings. These ratings are limited to admissions selectivity (which the book finally acknowledges towards the end of the text), and selectivity has no automatic correlation with prestige. The US News rankings might have served better. My experience in admissions and counseling is that little attention is paid by families to Barron's (I have never had a family mention the book, for instance). There is no proof in the book that families use this guide; it is simply assumed.
The acknowledgements indicate no interaction with anyone from the college admissions profession. The authors seem ignorant of programs such as funded campus visits for disadvantaged students (of all backgrounds, but for the most part for students of color). They also do not explore the financial pressures colleges face in trying to enroll classes while unable to fund a financial aid budget which would fully support diversity. Missing, too, is the fact that disadvantaged white students are the most marginalized group in the college admission process, and that a case can be made that Asian Americans can face particular admissions challenges from the most selective institutions.
There is a lot of discussion about how discriminatory it is that students of color are disproportionately placed in classes below the honors and AP level. The problem is that in a society rampant with educational inequality, they arrive at these schools with academic deficits which make survival in too-level classes a long shot at best. The authors claim that tutoring and other kinds of support are not available to help students overcome these deficits. Maybe so at the three schools they investigated, but in my experience it is common for this to be offered as much as is feasible. But what would really be necessary would be for the students to take additional coursework over the summer, which is not realistic emotionally or economically for students from lower income families.
College counselors are treated especially badly by the authors. They are accused of being only concerned with achieving a strong set of college matriculation results, rather than advancing the futures of students more individually. Yet the book points out that students of color do disproportionately well with placement in more selective colleges, even while saying that colleges don't seek out low-income Black students. My experience in handling calls from college counselors when I worked in admissions is that advocacy for disadvantaged students of color was typically more passionate that it was for students from more privileged backgrounds. The problem seems to be that their knowledge of college counseling is based on interviews only with the counselors at the three schools where they performed their research, and I suspect that the interviews were conducted in a way which was intended to support their thesis. It is truly odd to see the term "safety choice" used more than once, when it has been obsolete in college counseling for quite some time.
It is pointed out that Black students do not meet with their counselors. First of all, many white students also do not. The top of the class will make sure they have these meetings, but this is a function of their coming from more sophisticated families. I have seem countless examples of counselors who refuse to let Black students avoid meetings with them, even to the point of hunting them down in the hall and making an appointment on the spot.
There is, unfortunately, very little to recommend this book, since there are so many better options available in the abundance of literature on the college admission process. It also leaves me very disappointed in sociology as an academic discipline. To me, this book is mostly "this is the conclusion upon which I base my facts." I have to doubt strongly that looking at three schools can create any meaningful microcosm of the college admission process in the United States.
To begin with, the book is poorly written, laden with jargon and extraordinarily repetitious. It also superimposes a concept of class struggle on the college process which is never documented by footnotes. There are a lot of statements about what people value and how they behave that are simply assumed. Most of what is covered in the book seems obvious to me -- we are, even fifty years after the Civil Rights movement, in a racist society. We are also in a culture increasingly dominated and controlled by the very rich. How can we expect high schools to transcend the pressures engendered by these realities?
The authors have a minimal understanding of how college admissions works. They rely heavily on the Barron's guide and its college ratings. These ratings are limited to admissions selectivity (which the book finally acknowledges towards the end of the text), and selectivity has no automatic correlation with prestige. The US News rankings might have served better. My experience in admissions and counseling is that little attention is paid by families to Barron's (I have never had a family mention the book, for instance). There is no proof in the book that families use this guide; it is simply assumed.
The acknowledgements indicate no interaction with anyone from the college admissions profession. The authors seem ignorant of programs such as funded campus visits for disadvantaged students (of all backgrounds, but for the most part for students of color). They also do not explore the financial pressures colleges face in trying to enroll classes while unable to fund a financial aid budget which would fully support diversity. Missing, too, is the fact that disadvantaged white students are the most marginalized group in the college admission process, and that a case can be made that Asian Americans can face particular admissions challenges from the most selective institutions.
There is a lot of discussion about how discriminatory it is that students of color are disproportionately placed in classes below the honors and AP level. The problem is that in a society rampant with educational inequality, they arrive at these schools with academic deficits which make survival in too-level classes a long shot at best. The authors claim that tutoring and other kinds of support are not available to help students overcome these deficits. Maybe so at the three schools they investigated, but in my experience it is common for this to be offered as much as is feasible. But what would really be necessary would be for the students to take additional coursework over the summer, which is not realistic emotionally or economically for students from lower income families.
College counselors are treated especially badly by the authors. They are accused of being only concerned with achieving a strong set of college matriculation results, rather than advancing the futures of students more individually. Yet the book points out that students of color do disproportionately well with placement in more selective colleges, even while saying that colleges don't seek out low-income Black students. My experience in handling calls from college counselors when I worked in admissions is that advocacy for disadvantaged students of color was typically more passionate that it was for students from more privileged backgrounds. The problem seems to be that their knowledge of college counseling is based on interviews only with the counselors at the three schools where they performed their research, and I suspect that the interviews were conducted in a way which was intended to support their thesis. It is truly odd to see the term "safety choice" used more than once, when it has been obsolete in college counseling for quite some time.
It is pointed out that Black students do not meet with their counselors. First of all, many white students also do not. The top of the class will make sure they have these meetings, but this is a function of their coming from more sophisticated families. I have seem countless examples of counselors who refuse to let Black students avoid meetings with them, even to the point of hunting them down in the hall and making an appointment on the spot.
There is, unfortunately, very little to recommend this book, since there are so many better options available in the abundance of literature on the college admission process. It also leaves me very disappointed in sociology as an academic discipline. To me, this book is mostly "this is the conclusion upon which I base my facts." I have to doubt strongly that looking at three schools can create any meaningful microcosm of the college admission process in the United States.
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