Abstract
Thomas Kuhn famously argued that most scientific work, which he termed “normal science,” takes place within well-established paradigms. In sociology, the qualitative study of higher education has converged around such a paradigm. The “modal monograph,” if you will, (1) interprets college nearly exclusively in relation to stratification and mobility (2) by applying a predominantly Bourdieusian theoretical lens (3) to the experiences of individual students (4) attending selective residential institutions. Fitting more or less comfortably within this paradigm are some of the preeminent efforts of the last decade: Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton’s Paying for the Party, Jenny Stuber’s Inside the College Gates, Anthony Abraham Jack’s The Privileged Poor, Elizabeth Lee’s Class and Campus Life, Hamilton’s Parenting to a Degree, Ann Mullen’s Degrees of Inequality, and Ciarán Burke’s Culture, Capitals, and Graduate Futures.
Allison Hurst’s Amplified Advantage: Going to a “Good” College in an Era of Inequality is a rich, thick serving of this paradigmatic comfort food. It is an unabashedly Bourdieusian mapping of the small liberal arts college (“SLAC”) from the vantage point of individual students making their way through it. The good news is that taken on its own terms, Amplified Advantage is frequently quite accomplished. Although it takes a while to gain momentum, when it does—particularly in Chapters Six through Nine—it can be dazzling. Hurst’s class analyses of how students negotiate the complex terrain of elite colleges is uncommonly subtle and insightful. But given that this book is treading well-worn ground, two relevant questions arise. First, what does it add to the paradigm within which it operates? And second, what gets left out by staying so securely within paradigmatic boundaries?
In answer to the first question, the book’s virtues lie in its patient detail and subtle analysis. It presents, for instance, one of the more nuanced takes on major choice I have encountered (Chapter 6). In it, Hurst confronts head on the tension between “higher” learning as an end in itself (the “liberal arts mission”) and as preparation for a remunerative career. Hurst finds working-class students (in her sample) to be not particularly careerist in choosing a major; it is middle-class students who excel in this regard. Instead, first-generation working-class students are too often fully taken in by liberal arts colleges’ overt injunction to develop their personhood and find their passion; but unlike their privileged peers they are unable to do so in a way that builds to a profitable career. Other chapters contain similarly penetrating class analyses of how students engage in extracurricular activities and off-campus experiences like study abroad (Chapters 7 and 8).
I was particularly impressed by Hurst’s fine-grained analysis of student outcomes (Chapter 9). As this is the “climax” of the book’s analytic narrative, I will not reveal spoilers. But Hurst subtly and convincingly dissects divergent trajectories of students from class fractions frequently pooled together—such as the cultural-capital-rich “upper-middle-class” students and their more economically endowed counterparts—interpreting them as family-based class strategies rooted in habitus. Indeed, the analytic power of this particular chapter at times recalls that of the Bourdieu himself.
But remaining in paradigm has costs, and here they are considerable. First, the book’s findings are sometimes clearly overdetermined by its empirical restriction to an elite universe. Hurst is aware that SLACs serve a tiny fraction of the undergraduate population and that working-class students are dramatically underrepresented within them. But her analysis of the classed ways in which individuals arrive at a liberal arts college (Chapter 4) doesn’t fully appreciate the exceptionality of working-class students who end up at a SLAC. Alluded to, but excluded from the data by research design, are the experiences of such students’ high school peers, who mostly end up at community colleges or regional comprehensives if they attend college at all. Hurst compares working-class SLAC students only to their elite peers and so finds them to be lacking in know-how and purpose (i.e., “cultural capital”). Similarly—and this is the book’s overarching conclusion, from which it takes its title—she finds that working-class students do not draw nearly the benefits from SLAC attendance as do their elite peers. On this ground, she concludes that SLACs compound inequality. But had she compared working-class SLACers to their other obvious counterfactual—their high school classmates who went to (say) community college—she might have seen SLACs as engines of opportunity.
Second, the book’s Bourdieusian framework sidelines aspects of college that don’t contribute directly to status attainment. The Bourdieusian world is one without moral significance—or, more precisely, one whose actors do not have moral intuitions or experience the social world as having moral dimensionality. And it is one in which cultural meaning reduces to means and stakes in power-games, expressed symbolically. Bourdieusian actors are not so different from those of rational actor theory. True, rational calculation is automated into habitus, and capitals are diversified into multiple species and made field-dependent, but Bourdieu and followers ultimately explain action in terms of individual-level interest and that alone.
But so much about education, and particularly higher education, and particularly liberal arts colleges, simply doesn’t make sense from this perspective. It is hard to argue that majoring in, say, sociology is status- or resource-maximizing for anyone except for those bound for elite professorships (and likely not even for them). Why, indeed, do modern societies collectively spend trillions of dollars on education if it is really just a shell game for class reproduction? Surely a more efficient method of status transmission could have been developed by now.
Consider the book’s pièce de résistance: the analysis of major choice I lauded earlier. Hurst argues that cultural-capital-rich students select liberal arts fields through a practical sense that such fields groom them for well-paid leadership positions in the public or nonprofit sectors. But in fact Hurst only has early-career data, and most such students in her sample begin their careers in poorly paid, often part-time jobs. She extrapolates eventual success on the implicit Bourdieusian assumption that for the privileged, there simply has to be a deeper endgame operating (at least at the level of habitus). Meanwhile, she argues that working-class students select similar fields because they don’t divine that liberal arts rhetoric is really just window-dressing for the status-maximization that really matters at college. But what if we considered that moral intuitions and identities, however constructed, might sometimes affect major-choice and career-selection decisions? This theory is much more analytically parsimonious. And how many sociologists—Bourdieusians included—can honestly argue that moral considerations didn’t play a role in their choice of career?
My final quibble with this book has to do with a presentational choice. Throughout the book, Hurst supplements findings from what she sees as her primary data source—a representative-sample survey of SLAC students—with detail derived from a large number of interviews and observations. All this is well and good. But to present her qualitative data, Hurst constructs narratives of ten “fictionalized composite” characters attending two “fictionalized composite” SLACs. This is a tremendous misstep that woefully undermines the face validity of the material. Individual lives are, largely, strings of incidents upon which we impose order and meaning after the fact by building narratives. But in building such narratives, which incidents happen to which individual is empirically and interpretively relevant. Swapping them out implies an odd interchangeability among persons in various researcher-constructed categories. Had Hurst attributed incidents and actions to their actual participants she would have salvaged her material’s believability.
The present research paradigm—the Bourdieusian exploration of the residential college experience—has produced much valuable research, and on the whole Hurst’s book makes real and important contributions to it. She pushes us to think more deeply and precisely about how elite colleges contribute to stratification and social reproduction. And yet, one reads Amplified Advantage with a distinct feeling of familiarity. We do perhaps need this particular book, but I doubt that we need many more like it.