Class Warfare – Class, Race, and College Admissions in Top–Tier Secondary Schools

Stories abound about the lengths to which middle- and upper-middle-class parents will go to ensure a spot for their child at a prestigious university. From the Suzuki method to calculus-based physics, from AP tests all the way back to early-learning Kumon courses, students are increasingly pushed to excel, with that Harvard or Yale acceptance letter held tantalizingly in front of them. And nowhere is this drive more apparent than in our elite secondary schools. In Class Warfare, Lois Weis, Kristin Cipollone, and Heather Jenkins go inside the ivy-yearning halls of three such schools to offer a day-to-day, week-by-week look at this remarkable drive toward college admissions and one of its most salient purposes: to determine class. Drawing on deep and sustained contact with students, parents, teachers, and administrators at three iconic secondary schools in the United States, the authors unveil a formidable process of class positioning at the heart of the college admissions process.They detail the ways students and parents exploit every opportunity and employ every bit of cultural, social, and economic capital they can in order to gain admission into a "Most Competitive" or "Highly Competitive Plus" university. Moreover, they show how admissions into these schools - with their attendant rankings - are used to lock in or improve class standing for the next generation.

"An absorbing and detailed study of the reproduction of class privilege and the central role of access to highly selective universities as part of that process. It should be required reading for everyone interested in how social class and race work through educational processes and institutions." -- "London Review of Education", "Covering an impressive amount of ground, Class Warfare does an excellent job of mapping the intricate ecosystem in which students are enmeshed, from school to parental gossip networks, and also offers a complex, noteworthy discussion of how race and class dynamics combine to compound marginalisation for outsider minority students. . . . This is a welcome addition to research on the US university admissions system's role in perpetuating inequality."-- "Times Higher Education"

Lois Weis is the SUNY Distinguished Professor of Sociology of Education at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She is the author of many books and most recently the editor of The Way Class Works. Kristin Cipollone is a lecturer at Buffalo State College, SUNY and a postdoctoral associate in the Graduate School of Education at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Heather Jenkins is director of Academic Programs & High School Prep at Buffalo Prep.