Here, as promised, is a podcast we made at the Center for Ethics and Education based on interviews we did with Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson, authors of the excellent book Can College Level The Playing Field, which is an indispensable read if you want to understand the relationship between inequality and higher education, and inequality within higher education, in the US. (For CT discussion of a very poor quality review of the book, see here). Also I unabashedly recommend the whole podcast series!
{ 20 comments }
superdestroyer 03.10.23 at 3:29 pm
The podcast never discussed risk, pathways to success, or parental support. If one looks at the book “Parenting to a Degree” Laura Hamilton points out that students from blue collar families would benefit much more from reality based academic/career counseling while most universities actually fail at providing counseling. The podcast never mentions it. It is more than just attending college. It is picking a major that leads to employment and career success that is achievable by the student. Yet, the podcast individuals seem to believe that a student from a blue collar family can attend the state flagship university and pursue the student’s passion with incurring no downside risk.
Harry 03.10.23 at 3:58 pm
Hamilton thinks that some students from blue collar families would do better at regional comprehensives. But she doesn’t actually test that out: and the truth is that counseling is just much less well-resourced at comprehensives than at flagships. I find the judgments that she and Armstrong make about particular students in Paying for the Party (same students as those whose parents are studied in PtaD) pretty compelling. But, on average, I think Sandy and Mike are right (and I don’t think Hamilton, or Armstrong, disagree — they don’t dispute the undermatching literature, they just say, rightly, that not everyone should go to most selective university that will take them).
LFC 03.10.23 at 5:00 pm
All students incur some “downside risk” in pursuing their passions, if those passions lie in fields with less good employment prospects than others. The benefits may well outweigh the risks, but the risks are still there.
For instance, a rich kid who majors in art history is incurring some risk, because his/her/their affluence is no guarantee that he/she/they will get a job as an academic or a curator, if that’s their career goal. The kids’ parents can give millions to museum X, but that doesn’t mean that museum X is going to hire the kid. Contrary to some popular beliefs, some institutions that are happy to take money don’t much like being bribed. Sure, if you’re so rich you never have to work a day in your life, you can become an independent scholar and writer, but what if the kid actually wants to work in an institutional setting? The notion that only blue-collar students “incur risk” in pursuing majors or fields perceived as risky is false. The levels of risk do differ, of course, but that’s a separate point.
engels 03.11.23 at 12:41 am
Sure, if you’re so rich you never have to work a day in your life, you can become an independent scholar and writer, but what if the kid actually wants to work in an institutional setting?
Can someone order me a nanoviolin from AliBaba?
J, not that one 03.11.23 at 7:55 pm
I think the point of Paying for the Party is weakened because there’s a gap between the pretty narrow evidence the authors present and the rather large conclusions they draw from it.
They are clear that they chose one, very unrepresentative dorm for their study but suggest the young women they studied are representative of the entire (female) student body.
The reader can draw herself a picture of what kind of young woman the authors feel is normative, not only by their choice of subject (girls who like to party and who value hanging out over studying), but also by the contemptuous way they dismiss those of the dorm’s residents who didn’t “fit in” (which assumes the party girls are the norm and no one else had any other social circle, that the others all rejected sociability outright).
The reader can draw a similar picture of what kind of career path the authors think is normative: one where college teaches a profession, which leads to employment in a large bureaucracy, and where the bureaucracies offer secure, prestigious employment to college graduates starting in their very first year. They treat entry-level employment at a large corporation as a failure. They also (interestingly) treat employment in a family firm as a failure.
This in turn suggests a lack of empirical knowledge of the many different environments Americans live and work in. Overall, the (rhetorical) effect is to reinforce an idea that working for another person or for an organization is degrading, and that for a woman to value work or learning or intellectual independence over being a member of a party-centered social circle is also degrading – in both cases, almost to the point of causing a person to be cast out of society itself.
To use this narrow focus to turn around and say “poor kids shouldn’t go to schools with rich ones because, as we can see, they don’t get the same results as rich kids” implies that only the rich kids’ life choices matter. “Can college get poor kids Birkin handbags?” is the wrong question to ask; “Can college get poor kids into middle management at CBS at age 22?” is similarly the wrong question.
And it seems to me this is just a (rhetorical) distraction from the real question of what kinds of advising kids need and how to get it to them.
Phil H 03.12.23 at 1:38 am
I dunno, it seems from the podcast and the reviews here that the authors let higher education off the hook much too easily. They ask, can college solve inequality, and find the answer to be no. But a more interesting question would surely be: can college stop exacerbating inequality, or even reduce it? Those big private equity firms aren’t hiring out of high schools. They’re hiring out of Harvard, specifically. At the moment, college is the tool that is used to execute the socioeconomic sorting of adults. If it were defanged (by, in the most extreme case, not existing) then class boundaries would be muddied and blurred for a generation (at least until new sorting mechanisms developed: guilds? more geographic segregation? in the worst case, through more comprehensive sorting at grade school…)
So it does seem to me like they’re tinkering, and letting the perfect (inability to eliminate inequality) be the enemy of the good: zero exacerbation of inequality, which I think is a very ambitious but potentially achievable goal.
engels 03.12.23 at 11:11 am
college is the tool that is used to execute the socioeconomic sorting of adults. If it were defanged (by, in the most extreme case, not existing) then class boundaries would be muddied and blurred for a generation (at least until new sorting mechanisms developed: guilds? more geographic segregation?
Private schools!
Harry 03.12.23 at 2:30 pm
“by the contemptuous way they dismiss those of the dorm’s residents who didn’t “fit in””
Honestly, I just reread the book for maybe the fifth time, and your read of their normative assumptions and conclusions is just about exactly the opposite of mine. Really amazing that people can read the same book and get something so radically different from it. Maybe look at Hamilton’s subsequent work partly following up on this to see what she really thinks.
J, not that one 03.12.23 at 2:45 pm
Harry @ 8
What stuck in my mind is their description of one or two girls who didn’t engage in the party atmosphere the authors perceived as the general culture of the dorm. They weren’t described as probably having better things to do elsewhere, but as people unwilling to involve themselves in society at all. Maybe that didn’t come across to you as contemptuous, but to me it did.
Harry 03.12.23 at 3:01 pm
Gosh, no, it really didn’t. Maybe look at it again? The discussion of the isolates is very sensitive to the fact that, eg, they don’t have the money needed to keep up. And the collective action problem they face (there are plenty of them but… they all think they’re alone because they are isolated). I’d say the reverse: that their discussion of the party scene is close to disapproving, and their attitude to the isolates, and to the working class girls who they think should have gone elsewhere, sympathetic. Certainly all the students I have read it with (almost all female, some partiers, some not, only a couple have been first years) took it that way.
M Caswell 03.12.23 at 4:24 pm
Consumption patterns (e.g., leisure , travel, education) are not the cause of wealth, they are the effects.
superdestroyer 03.12.23 at 6:10 pm
J, not that one
The author are clear that they only looked at white females at a state flagship university. However, the book does explain the behavior of many sorority types at many universities, about how careers are not tied to majors and GPA in college due to family connections, and that a student from a blue collar family who wants to major in art history faces much more risk than a student from a upper middle class white family.
One of the more interesting points in the book is that being a helicopter parent requires money.
superdestroyer 03.12.23 at 6:13 pm
the topic was covered at an Urban Institute presentation. I find it odd that the authors are not very good at explaining their point but just muddle around with many ideas.
https://www.urban.org/events/can-college-level-playing-field-higher-education-unequal-society
J, not that one 03.14.23 at 5:38 pm
superdestroyer, the book is more interesting than you make it sound. One of the authors’ most interesting results is not that art history degrees are inappropriate for working class kids, but that not all business degrees are equal. The narrow version of their argument (they have good but not absolutely compelling evidence for this, I think) is that smart rich kids largely avoid bad degrees because they have better high school advising and because their parents are hooked into better grapevines. (This is the less flashy part of the book, though, the part that isn’t about competitive consumption and partying.) That is, universities make money by selling bad degrees to people who don’t have the social and economic resources to understand what they’re buying. There are a few nonwhite students in their sample, but many more white kids who are trying to keep up with the richest, and suffer because this is impossible for them.
But the argument can be extended, very reasonably, to the idea that poor kids who take art history do so because of poor high school advising and uninformed parents.
Toni Menninger 03.15.23 at 8:21 am
LFC: “For instance, a rich kid who majors in art history is incurring some risk, because his/her/their affluence is no guarantee that he/she/they will get a job as an academic or a curator, if that’s their career goal.”
I find it baffling how you define “risk”. The possibility of not getting one’s dream job is not what I would call risk.
Toni Menninger 03.15.23 at 10:01 am
J 5: I haven’t read the book but I’m puzzled by the account you give:
“The reader can draw a similar picture of what kind of career path the authors think is normative: one where college teaches a profession, which leads to employment in a large bureaucracy, and where the bureaucracies offer secure, prestigious employment to college graduates starting in their very first year. They treat entry-level employment at a large corporation as a failure. They also (interestingly) treat employment in a family firm as a failure. … Overall, the (rhetorical) effect is to reinforce an idea that working for another person or for an organization is degrading”
So in your reading, the authors say that working for a large bureaucracy is better than working for a corporation, but ultimately any work “for an organization” is degrading?
superdestroyer 03.15.23 at 4:28 pm
Toni Menninger
The authors broke down risk as in graduating, working after graduating, working in a job that requires a college degree, and working in a job that matches one’s major. An example from the Parenting to a Degree was the woman from an affluent family who got a degree in Sports Broadcasting but ended up in a sales job at ESPN/ABC. She was working in a job that nominally required a college degree but her getting the entry job in Manhattan and keeping the job was more determined by her parental connections and family. That compares to young women from blue collar families who try to major in broadcast journalism, have no family support, cannot work in unpaid internships in NY or LA, and eventually dropped out.
And the book pointed out that students from affluent families incur little risk in majoring in things such as fashion merchandising, event planning, hospitality, broadcasting because the family’s resources will help them even if they have a low GPA. Whereas students from blue collar families are taking on a huge risk because even if they finish (which the women in the book did not) the degree does not lead to a career and the women are forced back into college a second time to get a degree in education/nursing/business.
J, not that one 03.15.23 at 8:10 pm
superdestroyer,
The ABC job is the kind of thing I think they’re wrong about. These degrees are not vocational in the sense that Sports Broadcasting teaches you to be a sports announcer. It prepares you for work in an industry, with further competition and dues paying expected, and in the case you describe seems to have worked as intended. Similarly a number of computer science majors will end up selling computers. And conversely a number of entry level workers at big corporations will end up eventually being promoted, because work experience is valued more than classwork.
Paying for the Party focused more on class reproduction than it sounds like the other did. That’s a very different focus than upward mobility, which is what most people probably associate with decreasing inequality. The book I read had a lot about kids who were affluent but wasted their time pretending to be rich, because their friends were. And I wasn’t convinced those girls’ families would have viewed their outcomes as failures as the researchers did.
J, not that one 03.15.23 at 10:20 pm
Toni Menninger @ 16
What the authors’ argument is (IIRC, it’s been a couple of years) at one point is: The school they’re studying has a Hospitality major, but their Hospitality program isn’t one of the top programs in the country. Thus, students who major in Hospitality and don’t have family connections find themselves, at best, in entry-level positions at corporations like Hilton. The authors are explicit that they don’t find these positions suitable for someone with a college degree in the field (and that they believe a graduate of a better program, a few of which they name, would have done better pretty much automatically).
They also remark “not reproducing her parents’ class status” for someone whose attitudes seem to me as if they are likely fairly typical of someone who does have family connections in a business — if that business were a typically sized family business, rather than, say, owning Hilton.
I’m not saying I find their attitudes to be coherent, by any means – just that they’re revealing of what they believe to be true of the job market and the US economy.
engels 03.23.23 at 9:26 pm
Hilton only hires receptionists with PhDs in hospitality now.
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