Literature Blog #4: Creating A Class - Mitchell Stevens

2) MLA Citation: 

Stevens, Mitchell L. Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites. Cambridge,       MA: Harvard UP, 2007. Print.

3) Summary:

Author Mitchell Stevens visited an exclusive private institution in the Northeast United States in an attempt to understand the college admissions process.  He notes that this university, while not being an Ivy League school, is of strong academic standing.  His belief that his findings at this one college represents a microcosm of the college admissions process as a whole, and that other institutions of similar nature have incredibly similar, if not identical, processes for student acceptance.  Largely, the book discusses how the acceptance process, and college itself, is a kind of dance merely made to ensure affluent, white upper middle class families are able to bequeath their money and power to their offspring.  According to Stevens, "this book is largely about privileged families and the impressive organizational machinery they have developed to pass their comfortable social positions on to their children."  This is confirmed by two theories, which in the eyes of Stevens are one in the same: the reproduction theory and the transaction theory.  These will both be defined in the "Key Terms" Section of this blog post.

4) Author:

Mitchell Stevens is an associate professor of sociology and associate professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.  

5) Key Terms:
Reproduction Theory: "Often called the reproduction thesis, holds that variation in educational attainment essentially is a coating for pre-existing class inequalities.  The reproduction thesis was built from Karl Marx’s insights about how powerful groups inevitably create social and cultural systems that legitimate their own class advantage.  From this perspective college degrees, and the classroom time and schoolwork they represent, provide palatable justification for the tendency of privileged families to hand privilege down to their children."


Transaction Theory:  "makes different sense of the very same correlation between family privilege and educational attainment.  This thesis argues that the replacement of traditional social hierarchies with educational ones is a definitive chapter in every society's progress toward modernity... as societies modernized, inequalities of family, caste, and tribe gradually give way to hierarchies predicated on individual achievement."

Credential Inflation: "the diminution of the value of college degrees in a labor market that was being flooded with them."

6) Quotes:

"College educations are now crucial components of our national class structure.  Most people presume that a college degree is a prerequisite for a financially comfortable adulthood, and a large corpus of sociological research on the relationship between educational attainment and life chances largely confirms the conventional wisdom" - page 10

 "Even if parents are wise to the system on the day their children are born, their knowledge is of little consequence if it is not matched by the resources required to put it into practice: the means to live in a community with excellent schools, expert college guidance, and student culture with a forward orientation toward college; the time and cash to invest in after-school sports leagues, summer music camps, private tutors, and horizon expanding travel." - page 21

"Keenly aware of the terms of elite college admission, privileged parents do everything in their power to make their children into ideal applicants.  They pay for academically excellent high schools.  They shower their children with books and field trips and lots of adult attention.  They nurture athletic talent through myriad youth sports programs." - page 15

7) Value:
This books poses excellent theories that can be explored via other peer reviewed articles and qualities sources to prove my overall case including the reproduction theory, transaction theory, credential based society, credential inflation, and more.  Additionally, it proves an unlimited resource on the college admissions process.  I expect a major part of my essay to include the tactics practiced by universities to maximize the amount of wealthy students and to provide capable pathways for them to succeed. Moreover, Stevens' writing acts as excellent sound bites providing quotes that will flawlessly fit into my own paper with little additional explanation necessary.