Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites
By Mitchell L. Stevens
Harvard University Press, 2007
$25.95, 264 pages followed by notes and an index, hardcover
Reviewed by Bruce J. Jones
Assistant Director of Admission
Whitman College (WA)
Sociologist Mitchell Stevens spent 18 months serving as an admission officer at a Northeast liberal arts college, rumored to be Hamilton College, but in reality it could be any of 50 or 100 small competitive colleges throughout the nation.
Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites, can be read as an insider’s view of selective college admission or as a text for a sociology course on class structure. The book is peppered with phrases such as “social reproduction”, “impression management” and “distributed cognition”. As such, it offers sober academic counterpoint to Daniel Golden’s journalistic and gossipy The Price of Admission (Crown, 2006).
The Life of an Admission Officer
Stevens has accurately described the roles and rhythms of an admission officer’s life. He is reflective and analytical about admissions at the same time that he is imbedded in the admission office, participating in the exhausting travel, interviewing prospective students, evaluating applications, and sitting in committee.
Admission officers will appreciate Stevens’ observations: that it is low pay for long hours, that there are relatively few senior positions, that admission personnel are the “face” of the college and often seen as an upbeat contrast to sometimes grumpy faculty members.
The author observes that selective college admission is overwhelmingly about white privilege, about affluent students with good teeth, extensive travel and test tutors. Unlike Golden, Stevens uses his academic roots to explain rather than judge. He notes that officers at selective colleges, although increasingly committed to all forms of diversity (geographic, ethnic, racial, class, etc), “…tend to invest where they are likely to see some return”, thus the visits to private and suburban high schools, those places most likely to send an overwhelming majority of their graduates to four-year colleges.
Sporting Issues
There is “chronic tension” between coaches and admission officers, the coaches trying to field winning teams, the admission officers trying to protect the academic integrity of the college. One admission officer, apparently with unintended humor, refers to the lack of academic preparation of those playing the “helmet sports”, specifically football and hockey.
But status and prestige are also part of athletic fields, the need to win against like academic institutions. Stevens cites the geographically challenging University Athletic Association whose far flung members include Brandeis, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western Reserve, University of Chicago, Emory, NYU, Rochester and Washington University. And one could cite historic athletic/academic rivalries: Harvard/Yale, Williams/Amherst, and Cal/Stanford.
Race
Stevens spends an exhaustive chapter on the challenges of expanding diversity at rural, Yankee colleges where “…only recently have students of color been invited to the table”. He says, “The enduring Anglo character of the College was hard to reconcile with contemporary expectations that elite higher education be ‘diverse’ ”. Although committed to enrolling underrepresented students, admission officers at smaller colleges are often in a losing battle in the fierce competition for black and Latino students.
Fat Envelopes
Stevens’ participation in “committee”, the exhaustive March meetings to select and craft a class of freshmen, paints a somewhat impersonal picture that it is applications rather than applicants being judged. This observation - along with open discussion of “expensive” and “free” applicants, the ability of senior officers to have final authority and the influence of certain secondary school advisors - guarantee the status quo that an institution will favor its “typical students”, who “…were the sustenance that the College relied upon most heavily to maintain its financial prosperity”.
Creating a Class closes with a review of higher education and societal trends since the mid-twentieth century and also includes thorough notes, worthy of a book that will be of interest both in the admission office and the sociology department.
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