The College Cheating Scandal, Inequality in College Admissions, and the Preoccupation with Status in Higher Education

Last month the college cheating scandal became our national soap opera with episode after episode of wealthy parents paying big money to hire test takers, falsify records, and create phony athletic profiles for their children. I’ll admit, I was in the front row gaping at the brazen grab for advantage by people who have every advantage imaginable, tuning in daily as the tawdry details emerged. The rich and famous were having their star turn on Jerry Springer.  

Within a few days of the breaking news, the national conversation broadened to the much more consequential issue of overall inequality in college admissions, and this discussion lasted for several weeks— a very long time in our sound-bite world. There was discussion of the legal, if questionable, ways the wealthy secure privilege though legacy admissions, donations and endowments, and the like; of the vast test-preparation and college advising industries; of the extraordinary advantages that accrue over time from access to resourced schools, enrichment programs, tutorials, and professional social networks.   

Less discussed but thankfully present was our obsession itself with admission to a small number of high prestige schools when, in fact, most education beyond high school in the United States occurs in community colleges, state colleges and universities, and regional colleges, public and private. The intense preoccupation with fifty or so “elite” institutions not only contributes to inequality, but also detracts from the real issue of what we should want from a college education and what needs to be done to enable all our institutions to forward that goal. 
            There is a powerful economic motive driving the scramble to get into the “best” schools, the wish to secure advantage for one’s children. Not unrelated is the symbolic motive of status, which was directly revealed in the transcripts of phone calls among the people involved in the scandal. Those of us who work in higher education were appalled by the cheating scandal, and a number of us have commented in various ways about the broader issue of inequality in access and admissions. But in our way we participate in the obsession with status that is part of the bad brew of social and economic factors underlying this whole mess. 

Concerns about status run throughout higher education, inflected with contemporary commercial and celebrity culture. Universities employ specialists to market their “brand.” Faculty hiring and promotion includes language of someone’s “star” status, even that someone is, God help us, a “rock star.” Several years ago I wrote a short essay about the preoccupation with status in higher education (published as “Who Is Smarter than Whom: Status Games in Higher Ed in Inside Higher Ed), and I think it might be worth rereading it in the context of our current discussion of inequality in college admissions. 

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A while back I was reading letters of support for an award, and in one of the letters there was a demeaning characterization of the home academic department of the candidate. While the letter writer praised the candidate to the skies, the writer portrayed the candidate’s department—a department of great prestige outside of the candidate’s university—as being of marginal status in the eyes of those in other academic disciplines within the university. The letter writer wanted to assure anonymous evaluators like me that the candidate was of much higher intellectual quality than the candidate’s discipline would suggest.  

Boy, am I sick of this academic snobbery.  

What I read is not without its irony, however—worthy of the most trenchant portrayals of academic life (think David Lodge’s Small World or Richard Russo’s Straight Man). The discipline of the snooty letter writer is one that I heard routinely ridiculed when I was studying and then teaching in an English Department. 

And so it goes in the academic status games. 

Applied disciplines (e.g., journalism, nursing, management) have less status than “pure” ones: philosophy, biology, mathematics. And within disciplines there is typically a status hierarchy, with “theoretical” pursuits having more dazzle than applied work. Art history and musicology trump the making of art or music. The theoretical mathematician has the status edge on the applied statistician. The literary theorist sits on a higher rung—much higher—than those who teach writing. 

Of course, these status dynamics are not absolute, are ignored, even subverted by some faculty, and an institution’s history and current reality come into play as well. And in our era of the “entrepreneurial university” and economic accountability, traditional academic status markers might lessen in importance; what will count will be enrollment numbers and the employability prospects of a given major. 

Still, as someone who has spent decades at a research university running a tutorial center and a freshman composition program and then residing in a school of education—all quite low in that disciplinary hierarchy—I can tell you that judgments of intellectual virtue based on disciplinary affiliation are alive and well and factor into all sorts of behaviors and decisions, from departmental funding , to faculty promotion, to the letters written for honors and awards—like the one I read. 

We have not even considered the more pronounced status differentials among various units at the college or university: for example student services versus academic departments. And then there are the loaded status distinctions made among the different kinds of institutions that comprise higher education in the United States: the community college versus the state college or university versus the research university—with research universities scrambling to climb to the top of their own heap. 

All professions generate status distinctions, so why should the field of higher education be any different? Fair enough; I take the point. But the thing that gets to me in all this is that the distinctions are made through narrow and self-interested attributions of intelligence that hardly reflect the variety of ways people use their minds to apply knowledge, solve problems, reason and make decisions, and so on. Furthermore, intelligence doesn’t reside inert in a discipline or a kind of work or in one segment of a system rather than another; intelligence emerges in activity and in context. The attributions of intelligence I’m concerned with have much more to do with the preservation of power and prestige and turf rather than helping us all—faculty, staff, and students—improve on what we do. Faculty don’t get better at teaching by luxuriating in their bona fides or looking down on the department across the quad. 

This last point about getting better at educating is at the center of a new book by my UCLA colleague, Alexander Astin, an expert on higher education in the United States. In Are You Smart Enough?, Astin argues that colleges—especially “elite” colleges—are more concerned with acquiring status markers of intelligence (high entering student gpas and test scores, faculty publication numbers, and so on) rather than creating the conditions for students to become more intelligent during their time in college. Instead of the scramble to attract students already identified as smart, Astin wonders, what if colleges put increased effort into helping students become smarter through more attention to teaching, mentoring, and enrichment activities? It’s a provocative and important question. 

Back, now, to that letter. Over the years, I’ve spent time in many sectors of higher education, from a medical school to a community college tutoring center, and one of the things that has most struck me is the distribution of intelligence across the domains of the enterprise. To be sure, I’ve observed the routine pursuit of trivial research, uninspired teaching and unimaginative management, tireless self-promotion. A whole host of sins spread across areas of study and levels of the system. But I’ve also witnessed insight and inspiration, deeply humane problem solving, moments of brilliance in both a writing and a mathematics classroom, in a counseling session and in a meeting of tutorial center coordinators, in a laboratory and in a library. No little domain has a lock on being smart. 

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A Reprise of Rags to Riches, Republican Style

            I suppose it is a good thing when even Ted Cruz is talking about economic inequality.

           

            Politicians of all ideological stripes are acknowledging the growing financial gap between the very few haves and the many have-nots. The solutions posed, however, fit a predictable pattern. The recent Republican budget, for example, contains a series of cuts to social programs while proposing tax cuts that will yield big benefits to the wealthy, who, the one-percent logic goes, will grow the economy and create jobs.

One strand in the GOP economic narrative is the celebration of individual initiative as the key to social mobility—and one favored public illustration of such initiative is the Republican politician who has risen from modest means: John Boehner, Rick Perry, Scott Walker, and the newly elected senator from Iowa, Joni Ernst, who on the campaign trail told of a childhood when she had to put plastic bags over her worn-out shoes. Senator Ernst’s family might well have had a hard time of it—so, too, the families of Messrs. Boehner, Perry, and Walker. The problem lies—as commentator Timothy Egan trenchantly argued a few weeks back [see article here]—in these politicians’ romanticized rendering of their family histories and the harsh public policies they justify with that rendering.

            Ten years ago, President Bush was successfully spinning rags-to-riches narratives in his nomination of two men for positions in his cabinet: Carlos Gutierrez for Secretary of Commerce and Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General. I wrote the commentary below for Salon, and I revived it for this blog during the last presidential campaign season, for it remained relevant.  Well, here we are again, entering a campaign that will be humming with talk about economic inequality and mobility.  Excuse me for reprising the essay, but, well, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

            I edit the commentary where I can to reduce some of the 2005 specifics; as you read it, substitute a contemporary political figure—let’s say Governor Walker or Speaker Boehner—for the two Bush cabinet appointees mentioned in the first few paragraphs.  You’ll see why I can’t help but replay this record.

           

***

         In Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger's novel about an enterprising bootblack, one of the author's fictitious benefactors offers the following rosy observation of upward mobility in America: "In this free country poverty is no bar to a man's advancement." The belief that individual effort can override social circumstances runs deep in the national psyche. It's in Ben Franklin, in Alger's immensely popular 19th-century novels – and most recently in the official speeches and well-publicized personal stories of two of George W. Bush's Cabinet nominees, Carlos Gutierrez and Alberto Gonzales.

         Indeed, Republican strategists have long sought candidates and nominees with up-from-the-bootstraps personal histories – an observation made nearly 50 years ago by New York Times columnist James Reston – and in Gutierrez and Gonzales, they have two exemplars. At Gonzales' Senate confirmation hearing, Sen. Arlen Specter called the judge's life a "Horatio Alger story." By now, his and Gutierrez' stories are well known. Gonzales was born the son of migrant farmworkers, one of seven siblings living in a two-bedroom house with no hot water and phone. He took his first job at 12, eventually went to Harvard Law School and rose through Texas politics to become Bush's White House counsel. Gutierrez, a Cuban refugee who was 6-years-old when his family fled to the States with little money, learned English from a Miami bellhop.  He began his business career selling Kellogg's Frosted Flakes from a van in Mexico, and nearly 25 years later ascended to CEO.

         Gutierrez and Gonzales are clearly exceptional men, and their inspiring stories are served up as evidence of their character and worthiness to serve the nation. [Gonzales would later resign over controversies involving surveillance, “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and politically motivated firings of U.S. Attornies.] Yet Bush's selection of them for Cabinet posts, shrewd on several levels, also warrants examination as cunning political strategy. In choosing them, Bush appeals to Cuban-American and Mexican-American constituencies. And in celebrating these rags-to-riches stories, Bush offers the promise of upward mobility. When Bush named Gutierrez, he called him "a great American success story" and "an inspiration to millions of men and women who dream of a better life." By association, the administration counters the perception that the GOP is the party of privilege, and suggests that with Republicans in charge, even people of modest means can prosper and ascend to power: Cabinet member as Everyman. This message is hugely important as the Republican Party continues to court lower and middle-income voters.

         But there is duplicity at the core of the message. Since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the nation has witnessed a rolling back of the social protections of the welfare state, a carefully orchestrated opposition to safeguards against inequality and, with that, a widening income gap. The rich – the very rich, especially – are getting much richer; the middle stagnates, and the poor fall off the charts. Opportunity is championed while unions are threatened, workplace health and safety regulations eroded, and an increase in the minimum wage stonewalled.

         And yet, one of the most striking things about rags-to-riches, Republican-style tales is that they are accounts of hardship with almost no feel of hardship to them. They reflect a kind of opportunity that exists only in a reactionary fable. (And here they differ significantly from the Horatio Alger originals.) Obstacles receive brief mention – if mentioned at all – and anger, doubt, or despair are virtually absent. You won't see the female cannery worker with injured hands or the guys at bitter loose ends when the factory closes. You won't see people, exhausted, shuttling between two or more jobs to make a living or the anxious scramble for minimal healthcare for their kids.

         The GOP stories present a world stripped of the physical and moral insult of poverty, not just sanitized – a criticism often and legitimately made – but also distilled, a clean pencil sketch of existence without complication. These tales appear in the Republican rhetoric surrounding any issue dealing with poverty, such as public housing, entitlement programs or health care. This erasure of poverty's afflictions makes sense. To do otherwise is to make palpable the dark side of capitalism and the injuries of social class. And conservative strategists have been working very hard, and effectively, to bleach an understanding of class from the public mind.

         Along the landscape of Republican rags-to-riches stories, characters move upward, driven by self-reliance, optimism, faith, responsibility. Though there will be occasional reference to teachers or employers who were impressed with the candidate's qualities, the explanations for the candidate's achievements rest pretty much within his or her individual spirit. The one exception is parents: They are usually mentioned as the source of virtue. Family values as the core of economic mobility.

         In the Alger originals, the lucky break, the fortuitous encounter is key to the enterprising hero's ascent. There's little play of chance in the contemporary Republican version. Luck's got nothing to do with it. Nor, it seems, does raw ambition and deal-making. There is not a hint of the red tooth and claw of organizational life in these tales. And you surely will not hear a whisper about legislation or social movements that may have enhanced opportunity, opened a door, or removed an obstacle. It would be hard to find a more radically individual portrait of achievement. It should be said that social and economic mobility is possible in the United States, though it has been stalling for decades. But does it happen as depicted in the Republican success stories?

         The stories of mobility I know differ greatly from the Republican script. To be sure, there is hard work and perseverance and faith – sometimes deeply religious faith. But many people with these same characteristics don't make it out of poverty. Discrimination is intractable, or the local economy devastated to the core, or the consequences of poor education cannot be overcome, or one's health gives out, or family ties (and, often, tragedy) overwhelm.

         The people who do succeed – and their gains are typically modest – often tell stories of success mixed with setbacks, of two steps forward and one back. Such stories reveal anger and nagging worry, or compromise and ambivalence, or a bruising confrontation with one's real or imagined inadequacies – "falling down within me," as one woman in an adult literacy program put it. This is the lived experience of social class. No wonder that these truer stories typically give great significance to help of some kind, both private and public. A relative, a friend, or a minister lends a hand. Family and community social networks open up an opportunity. A local occupational center provides training. The government's safety net – welfare, Medicaid, public housing – shelters one from devastation.

         It is the Right's grand ambition, as political journalist William Greider observed several years ago, to roll back the 20th century, to take us back, in policy terms, to the McKinley era. That was a time before the protections of the New Deal and the Great Society, a time of unregulated corporate power and a Social Darwinist view of the social order. The conservatives would keep government out and let the market determine the order of things.

         This is the ideological back-story to the feel-good celebrations of Republican leaders’ rise from hardship. Rags-to-riches stories have always been one part possibility, two parts fantasy. Perhaps as antidote, following Greider's lead, we should reread The Jungle or The Shame of The Cities, placing those early-20th century accounts of industrial brutality and urban squalor alongside Republican narratives of success. People like those I grew up with and have worked with over the years will be terribly hurt in the world the GOP is trying to create, the ladder of success kicked out from under them.

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Seeing the Invisible Poor

            Following is an interview published in the Fall, 2014 issue of The Hedgehog Review. If you are not familiar with this fine magazine, you might want to give it a look. It comes out of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia and bills itself as offering “critical reflections on contemporary culture.”

***

The Hedgehog Review: You’ve written very eloquently about the challenges facing people who live and work at the bottom of our socioeconomic ladder, and one of the things you’ve noticed—something you claim is greatly complicating their plight—is how many, if not most, of them are becoming invisible to the rest of society. What do mean by this? How did it happen, and is it getting worse?

Mike Rose: Well, they’re not literally invisible, of course—there are at least forty-five million people in the United States living at or below the poverty line. But they are close to absent from public and political discourse, except as an abstraction—an income category low on the socioeconomic status index—or as a negative generalization: The poor are dependent on the government, the “takers,” a problem. Consider Congressman Paul Ryan’s recent comments about generations of men in the inner city “not even thinking about working.” Neither the abstractions nor the generalizations give us actual people trying to live their lives as best they can.

Because of the various layers of segregation in our society—from work to schools to places of worship—those of us who are relatively socially mobile have few opportunities to live and work closely with people who are at the bottom of the income ladder. We don’t know them. And because we don’t know their values and aspirations, the particulars of their daily decisions, and the economic and psychological boundaries within which those decisions are made, the poor easily become psychologically one-dimensional—intellectually, emotionally, and volitionally simplified, not quite like us.

THR: Despite the growing gulf between the poor and “the rest,” you’ve been pretty successful in staying in touch with what might be called the invisible class. What’s given you this access, this connection?

MR: Well, I wouldn’t want to claim any exceptional access or broad-scale knowledge. There are many poor communities—most, really—that I don’t know much about at all. I grew up poor—my father was chronically ill and my mother worked long hours as a waitress—so I have a personal, intimate sense of economic hardship and insecurity. And a significant amount of work I’ve done over the years, both my own teaching and mentoring and my research, has involved people who are behind the economic eight ball. That work has taught me a lot. It has also enabled me to develop some relationships in which people have opened up parts of their lives to me. And I suspect the knowledge I gained from my family’s own difficulties helps foster those relationships.

THR: How do we almost reflexively diminish the capacities, ambition, imagination, and determination of the poor—and thereby add to the distance that separates the well-off from the less well-off?

MR: It’s a complicated business, to be sure, but I think our separation, our increasing economic segregation contributes to the diminishment. With segregation comes ignorance and apprehension. Part of the way we establish our shared humanity is by what we imagine goes on inside the head and the heart of others. If we are separated from a group not only physically but psychologically, then it becomes all the easier to attribute to them motives, beliefs, thoughts—an entire interior life—that might be deeply inaccurate and inadequate. And it’s from those attributions we develop both our personal and public-policy responses to poverty.

THR: How do we even begin to break down barriers, or bridge the gulf, between the poor and the rest of society?

MR: There are so many structural impediments, from residential patterns that have developed partly out of housing policy to income inequality and the shredding of the social safety net. So, for starters, if we want to address the isolation I’m talking about, we need to do things that simply help poor people live a decent life: a higher minimum wage, tax credits, jobs programs, childcare, housing and transportation assistance. It’s hard to participate in society when you’re scrambling for your next meal or being booted out of your apartment. I’m not optimistic, given the focus on austerity and the terribly ungenerous cast to so many public policy deliberations.

We also need opportunities for people to develop and grow: educational and cultural programs, apprenticeships and job training, civic organizations. I’m thinking about places or occasions where poor people become more fully present actors on the societal stage, where their thoughts and feelings play out in ways that can have a positive effect on the direction of their lives. Social movements for civil rights or economic justice provide such a space. Cultural projects do as well—in churches and community centers, women’s shelters, prison art programs. And, in my experience, second-chance educational programs and institutions—literacy centers, adult schools, many community colleges—can also play this role.

But these are complex institutions. Given the intricate relation in our country among social class, educational resources, and academic achievement, the adult school and community college reflect educational inequality and can contribute to it. A lot of students never complete a certificate or degree. Some institutions do better than others with similar populations, so the quality of governance, services, and teaching matters. These institutions are among the few places in mainstream society where poor people can become more publicly visible and display to their advantage multiple dimensions of their lives.

THR: Can you tell us how some of your own experiences in these places led to new understandings of the poor and their various plights?

MR: Let me give you a recent one. I spent several years studying a community college that serves one of the poorest populations in Southern California. Many of the students are older, coming back to school once their children are grown, or after a series of dead-end jobs, or having spent time in prison. Those coming straight from high school typically went to underperforming schools. Most students have to take remedial English or math. The majority of students are on financial aid and are burdened with health, housing, or transportation problems. They’ve got a lot on their shoulders.

One of the things that struck me—and it happened in stages, as I saw one example, then another, then another—was the powerful desire being at the college unleashed in these students. Parents wanted to improve their economic prospects and do better by their kids. People who hadn’t been in a classroom in decades spoke passionately about wanting to learn math this time or to become better readers and writers. Burly, trash-talking guys in a welding class were complimenting each other on welds being “beautiful” or “pretty,” and, in their math class, were arguing about the correct solution to a problem. From physics to fashion design, students were beginning to redefine themselves, to envision a future of possibility. As one young woman said, “You will grow in a way that you never in your mind would imagine.”

Of course, not all students at the college are affected so powerfully, and too many leave out of discouragement or because of financial burdens. But to witness repeatedly the mental vitality, the hope, the redefining of one’s sense of self, makes you realize what is possible when the conditions are right.

THR: So, in addition to its practical economic value, college for these students yields other benefits as well?

MR: Absolutely. Even for the most occupationally oriented students. One of the things that concerns me about current education policy aimed at students like these is its strict economic focus. We need to get more people into college to enhance their economic prospects and to secure the nation’s economic future. Fine and true enough. The students want an economic boost, too. As one guy said bluntly in an orientation session, “I’m here because I don’t want to work a crappy job all my life.”

But so much else typically happens along the way. Students comment on how good it feels to learn new things, or to overcome old insecurities, or to have new intellectual and social as well as occupational avenues open up to them. If we don’t acknowledge and try to foster this rich dimension of their education, then we’re just repeating a long and troubling tendency in American education policy. Working-class students get a strictly functional education, heavy on job training and thin on everything else.

THR: Could you say something about another important, but often overlooked, institution that is important to people with relatively few resources? I mean the public library.

MR: When I was visiting public schools in small rural communities, I was struck by the role played by the local library. In addition to housing books and some films and music, it’s an information resource, a meeting place, an Internet outlet. And in places where the population is sparse and widely distributed, the traveling library is a godsend. I spent a week at a one-room schoolhouse in Montana’s Beaverhead National Forest , and there was a tiny library attached to the school, the only library around. It was the place kids got their books—and there were several intense readers in the class of fifteen, always hunched over a book. What a resource!

Rural or urban, libraries are a national treasure, and it’s easy in these days of connectivity and constantly streaming media to forget how important they are to so many who can’t afford all the technological bells and whistles. It’s shocking, I think, that libraries are being forced to reduce hours and staff and close local branches. And this is at a time when two-thirds of the nation’s libraries provide the only free Internet access in their communities—and when government and employment information and forms are increasingly going online.

THR: There’ve been many debates over the touchy subject of intelligence, what it is, how we measure it, and how such conceptions and measurements affect life chances and opportunities.  How does what you call “a reductive view of intelligence” stand in the way of appreciating the inner lives of individuals who are often dismissed as society’s less able or less gifted—and who are undercompensated as a result?

MR: As a country, we seem to be obsessed with intelligence, with measuring it, with boosting our kids’ intelligence through products like Baby Einstein, with getting “smarter” workers into the new “smart” workplace. But the odd thing is that we tend to rely on a fairly narrow way of determining intelligence: We identify it with a score on a standard intelligence test and with the traditional school-based task.

If one does well on an intelligence test or in school, that clearly indicates some kind of cognitive competence. But if one doesn’t do well—and, historically, poor performers include many low-income people—then the meaning of the score is much less clear. To do well tells us something about intelligence—and, usually, schooling—but not to do well provides much less information about intellectual capacity… though that poor performance may speak volumes about educational opportunity.

What struck me as I did the research for The Mind at Work was the number of instances of reasoning, of problem solving, of learning and applying that learning, that fell outside what gets assessed in an intelligence test or the traditional school curriculum. There is the waitress at rush hour prioritizing on the fly a number of demands from customers, the kitchen, and the manager. And the plumber diagnosing a problem by feeling with his hands the pipes he can’t see behind an old wall. And the hair stylist figuring out the style a customer wants through talk and gesture. This kind of brainwork surrounds us, yet might not be considered when we talk about intelligence.

THR: You’ve talked about some of the ways the lives of the poor are made harder by their growing “invisibility,” but how is the rest of society, including the better off, made worse—and even impoverished—by the “disappearance of the poor”?

MR: Poverty represents a society’s moral and civic failure. It also constricts our collective intelligence and creativity as so many people’s potential is squelched. Thank goodness the notion of an “opportunity gap” is finally making its way into public discussion. That gap hurts all of us.

One more thing. The marginalization poverty begets keeps from the mainstream entire categories of experience and points of view that can enrich our culture and the way we understand and try to solve a whole range of problems. I don’t want to romanticize the kinds of students I spent time with at that community college or claim that as a group they have superior gifts or insights. But some of them, because of their backgrounds, ask different kinds of questions, draw on fresh illustrations, come at problems in unusual ways. Nurturing that kind of intellectual and social diversity benefits us all.

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