My daughter is a senior from a public school with a class size of 589. She has a 4.0 GPA with mostly advanced and AP classes, except required classes. She has an SAT of 2,250, ACT 36. So she is a National Merit finalist, President Scholar candidate, and a winner of MI Southeast Conference All Academy Award (only five students in her school win). She is a cellist in symphony orchestra and a varsity crew member on the rowing team.

Yet she was rejected by four Ivy schools and put on the waiting list for the University of Chicago. What went wrong? Her counselor was stunned by her rejection. What should she do to get off the waiting list?

…
Answer:Your daughter sounds like a terrific scholar, musician, and athlete. The world of selective college admissions is so hyper-competitive that trying to read the tea leaves about why decisions were rendered is almost impossible…

One feels sorry for the daughter, she is such a quantitatively perfect person. Her SAT score is higher than most graduate students’ monthly incomes. She has perfect grades. She has perfect stats. She has more honors and decoratations than a military veteran. She comes from a public school, so she isn’t too marked by obvious badges of class status. She appears, at least to her parent, as a completely flawless unit ready for insertion into what was, evidently, expected to be a flawlessly meritocratic system.

Such was the strength of the expectation, that perfect preparation equals perfect success, that its failure provokes a moment of stunned incomprehension. “What went wrong?” On one level, this question is rhetorical, even performative: the parent already knows what went wrong: their daughter didn’t get in where she was supposed to. The very question what went wrong? presupposes an assumption that the daughter could not possibly have been rejected, projects an image of a world that functions automatically, a giant sorting system in which the best reliably get what they deserve.

The system is fake, to state the obvious. For one thing, because the qualities that make one a perfect student are themselves not evenly distributed from equal starting points; rather they’re a function of family background, class status, home town, gender, race… The response to her letter read in part: “Gender does play a role and it is simply more competitive for young women at most places these days.” I wasn’t aware of that but I guess it’s not surprising, given statistics that more women than men are going to college.

But these kinds of systematic biases are relatively minor flaws in the meritocracy compared to its real problem, which is that sometimes it just doesn’t produce the reliable result one expected, sometimes it doesn’t pick people who seem to be the best, sometimes its results are shocking, random, arbitrary. This arbitrariness is understood by the people making the choices between applicants, I think, but is viscerally felt much more by the system’s rejects.

One feels sorry for the daughter, or at least for her parent, whose fantasies of vicarious success seem to be developed to a high degree. It doesn’t seem to occur to people like these to long for a world where higher education wasn’t organized as a massive meritocracy, where the education was more even in quality across different institutions, where a few overvalued elite institutions (and I should know, having gone to two of them now) get more credit than they deserve. There seems to be no chance of a political analysis of class reproduction occurring in this situation. Ultimately, it’s not just the daughter’s rejection that’s shatteringly arbitrary, it’s the whole system of higher education that comes to appear like a castle in the clouds, a fantasy world of success more longed for than understood.

Two essays in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education serve as excellent examples of this anxiety. One is a statement of overt class guilt by William Pannapacker (pseudonym Thomas Benton). He tells us he dreams of going back to his old neighborhood, only to comment that:

I also know the old neighborhood is the Tahiti of the former-working-class imagination: a dream of unselfconscious authenticity, acceptance, and deep familiarity with the rules of social interaction. Of course, it is a self-serving myth.

I know that I don’t belong in the old neighborhood, either. I made my choices long ago; or perhaps others made them for me. No one is awaiting my return. I think I can hear what they’d say: “You seem to like playing the working-class hero for rich people. Whatever. Do it if it works for you. You never belonged here anyway, even when you were a kid. If I could get out of here, I would. So get on with your life. We’ll be fine without you.”

Meanwhile, back on the job as a tenured professor — certifying the inherited status of his middle-class students — the self-proclaimed “academic class traitor” romanticizes his alienation and mocks his own naïve posturing. He realizes there are no people whom he can serve without some inner conflict.

I like this as an analysis of the dynamics of class fantasy. The professor with working-class roots (a) romanticizes his past; only to (b) reject his fantasy as a dream of acceptance; followed by (c) fantasizing his own rejection by his old associates; and finally concluding (d) with the thought that all social life involves psychic conflict and contradiction. Which is true; but it’s a conclusion that entails resignation, depoliticization, disempowerment. Pannapacker ends by remarking that he tries to deal with these contradictions by keeping an eye out for working class kids and encouraging them as he can. This is certainly better than wholly abandoning academia to the affluent, but it will never lead to political change. After all, to aid working class kids in becoming upwardly socially mobile is to presuppose the existence of class divisions that one can only cross on a purely individual level.

Whereas if we read Gary Lavergne’s “College Admissions as Conspiracy Theory,” (a book review of recent work on the inequities of higher education,) we get the opposite, a rejection of class guilt, but one that also seems to lead towards naturalizing economic privilege:

It irks me to read four books telling me that my children are “privileged” or that I’m part of an “alliance of equals” oppressing the poor. In these books my children are “privileged” because my wife and I stayed married, have good jobs, paid attention to what our children did, bought them books, got involved in their schools, and shared the benefits of an education we earned — all of which resulted in our kids’ not being poor and not getting Pell Grants (which apparently makes them rich). I don’t remember seeing any distinction drawn between a “privileged” family like mine and one with five generations of Yale graduates in its lineage.

Lavergne comes from a poor Louisiana background and made his way “upward,” I gather from the surrounding paragraphs. Needless to say, there’s lots of social differentiation that doesn’t directly correspond to wealth or class status per se, and he’s right to point out that there’s social differentiation among the affluent. And an interesting theme here is the importance of intense parental labor in helping their children to reproduce their class status – by helping them to get suitable educations. (Educational institutions remain central to the social reproduction of elites, as they have been for a long time. Apparently medieval monasteries got a substantial fraction of their members from the unwanted children of the nobility.) But the key move here is the claim that Lavergne’s poor origins make him less a member of the upper middle class. In other words: his past becomes a way of disavowing his class privilege in the present.

Lavergne goes on to argue that:

All parents, even the rich ones, want what is best for their children. The parents considered “privileged” in these books aren’t spending their time forming alliances to oppress others. What are they supposed to do? Not use what they have, nor do what they can, to achieve what is best for their children?

And consequently he suggests that the fundamental problem isn’t that elite students are overrepresented but that there simply isn’t the institutional capacity to give good educations to all qualified applicants. He rightly points out that there isn’t the political will to fund public universities at an adequate level or capacity. He concedes, of course, that “elite colleges are overpopulated with affluent young people,” but he ends by arguing that:

Every day I see thousands of “privileged” students sent to our campus by their once-underprivileged parents. It wasn’t easy for many of them to get there. They don’t deserve a guilt trip. For millions of us, social mobility is alive and well in capitalist America.

It strikes me that Lavergne, who manages admissions research for the University of Texas-Austin, has to confront the ugly facts of class stratification in America more than most, and we might view his book review as an attempt to manage the same class anxieties that Pannapacker articulates more clearly, the anxieties that seem to accompany upward mobility in America more generally.

But it bears notice that, in the same issue of the Chronicle, an article describes a rampant sense among academics that they’re imposters, that they don’t deserve to be there, that they’re constantly afraid of being found out as fakes or phonies. Apparently such feelings befall people from many social backgrounds: as the journalist sarcastically comments, “we have come so far in the American postindustrial meritocracy that everyone has equal access to guilt-ridden feelings of fraudulence.” Valerie Young, who is on a lecture tour to publicize her findings, seems to send the message: relax, and accept your success! “We couldn’t have all gotten here for crap reasons,” a graduate student apparently commented after Young’s lecture.

These articles reveal an active ambivalence about the social order of American academia and one’s individual place in it. But they also portray an active struggle to naturalize the status quo, to get one to accept one’s role, to stop worrying, to put an end to anxiety. To me, it’s a relief that these struggles aren’t successful, that anxiety persists, and that restlessness may ultimately lead to reform.