Creating a Class

"This book is about the process by which American universities and liberal arts colleges decide who they will admit. The author (who now teaches at Stanford’s School of Education) spent a lot of time at the admissions office of an elite liberal arts college, trying to document the criteria that are used to—as the title suggests—create a class. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . As the admissions policies of Harvard are now under the microscope as part of a lawsuit charging discrimination against Asian-American applicants, this topic is particularly salient. In response to a Supreme Court decision in a case against University of Michigan from some years ago, schools were forced to revise the affirmative action policies created to assist African-Americans. After that an important decision, Regents of University of California v. Bakke (1978), universities redefined their criteria so that diversity in general would be valued. As a result, some students are accepted not only for their academic excellence, but also because they add to the diversity of perspectives on campus. For example, because they come from Kansas, or they’re an opera singer, or due to their ethnicity. “Emphasis on extracurriculars can have a perverse effect” This book is about the range of criteria that universities use to assess students now. Another book by Natasha Warikoo published since, The Diversity Bargain: And Other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions, and Meritocracy at Elite Universities , compares admission at Oxford, Brown and Harvard. In principle, Oxford does not consider extracurricular involvement during its admissions process, whereas American universities do. This has a huge impact on how American teenagers spend their time. The emphasis on extracurriculars can have a perverse effect. Many kids spread themselves so thin across a number of activities in an effort to maximize their college chances. I have a student, Stefan Beljean, who’s writing a doctoral dissertation comparing high school students in Boston and Berlin. He shows how young Americans between the ages of thirteen and eighteen organize their lives around maximizing their potential to be admitted to a top college. These kids end up exhausted, depressed, and cynical as a result. The concept of ‘social reproduction’ comes from Pierre Bourdieu, one of the most important sociologists of the last century (and with whom I studied.) It refers to the social processes and structures that transmit inequality. For instance, as we’ve discussed, universities measure and reward students according to how well they conform to middle-class lifestyles. So, evaluation that appears to be neutral is, in fact, class-based. His work was done in the French context but was imported to the United States. “Higher education is not only about building human capital—it’s also about acquiring and consolidating class-specific cultural dispositions that contribute to opportunity hoarding and maintaining class boundaries” This concept was particularly illuminating in the United States, where higher education was understood as promoting greater equality. It shows how the reality often belies or counteract that ideal. Higher education is not only about building human capital—it’s also about acquiring and consolidating class-specific cultural dispositions that contribute to opportunity hoarding and maintaining class boundaries."