Franklin d. roosevelt was born in 1882, Barack Obama in 1961. Roosevelt graduated from Harvard and went on to Columbia Law School. Obama graduated from Columbia and went on to Harvard Law School. Both led the American Democratic Party as successful Presidential candidates, the first in 1932, the second in 2008. Yet Roosevelt was an established member of the American upper class, a veritable WASP, and Obama is a Black American. Jerome Karabel recounts the story of what happened at “the Big Three”, Harvard, Yale and Princeton (henceforth HYP) in the years between.
This is an important book whether read as a contribution to the history of the USA or as an addition to the sociology of education. What Karabel is arguing becomes explicit on p. 536. “The transformation of Harvard, Yale and Princeton from enclaves of the Protestant upper class into institutions with a striking degree of racial, ethnic, and religious [and gender] diversity was by any standard historic. Yet beneath this dramatic and highly visible change in the physiognomy of the student body was a surprising degree of stability in one crucial regard – the privileged class origins of the students at the Big Three”. He goes on to point out that by 2000 the cost of a year at HYP had risen to $35,000 – a colossal sum which could not be afforded by over 90 % of the American families. Yet a majority of the HYP freshmen were able to pay their expenses without extra-familial financial assistance.
Karabel tells this American story in compelling detail in the previous 500 pages. But the story is not new. Indeed it is at least 20 years old as a common feature of the leading countries of the world – Oxford and Cambridge in England, the Grandes Écoles in France, the national university in Japan and the law faculties in Germany.
Let me “declare an interest” as modern authors have been urged to do since R. K. Merton encouraged sociologists to write a short autobiographical prefatory paragraph to any of their substantial works. I first met Karabel in the 1970s when he came to Nuffield College, Oxford, as a graduate student from Harvard. My first reader in the sociology of education (Education, Economy and Society) had appeared in 1961, and I intended to write a second version in about 1980, reflecting the rapid development of the subject. But Karabel persuaded me to move more quickly and I agreed. So began a fruitful partnership to which he brought a Marxist approach with persistent enthusiasm to confront my own ethical socialism and adherence to the “political arithmetic” tradition (Halsey 1982). We sent off the second version of the Reader to OUP, New York under the title Power and Ideology in Education in 1976.
At the end of 1976 I lost touch with Karabel. He began work, (so he tells us on p. 684) on admission to HYP in 1977 and here, thirty years later, is the result, much acclaimed in America. What strikes me most about this colossal compendium is the sheer effort that must have gone into the organisation of the array of students and colleagues at Berkeley and Harvard to whom he offers generous gratitude in his elaborate acknowledgements at the end of a vast tome.
Karabel thinks of the period before 1920 as one in which HYP was dominated by WASPS. He then goes on to describe the preparatory private school Groton and its headmaster Endicott Peabody as the leading proponent of muscular Christianity, sporting prowess, leading to moral integrity, public service and community spirit – all components of the English gentleman nurtured in England by Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge and admired by the patrician upper class of America as well as by German observers (W. Dibelius, England, London, Jonathan Cape, 1930; the first German edition was in 1922).
In the late nineteenth century the Ivy league imitated the reforming universities of England and Europe. Harvard President Charles Eliot (1834-1926) like Peabody, also claimed a distinguished pedigree – a Boston Brahmin's Brahmin. He was, however, a liberal and tolerant man, an opponent of the Spanish-American War and a progressive on the great issues of the day such as immigration, women's education, and foreign policy. He fostered student freedom at Harvard by, for example, introducing the elective system. He was a determined meritocrat, an unsuccessful opponent of the obsession with football and a successful proponent of greater diversity in the social composition of Harvard undergraduates. In short Eliot belonged to the liberal, democratic wing of the American upper class. His successor Abbot Lowell (1857-1943) represented the conservative and exclusionary wing of the same elevated class, was also an enthusiastic Anglophile, believing firmly that the Anglo-American race had a special talent for the art of self-government. Oxford and Cambridge were his model for what Harvard could and should become – a university where undergraduates were tutored to a “well rounded manhood, each as perfect as may be in body, mind and soul” (p. 47).
As a chronicler of undergraduate admissions to HYP from roughly the 1920s to the end of that century Karabel is superb. He has examined the sources with meticulous and wide-ranging care and has put together an authoritative work of reference which will be standard for many years to come. If I criticise its overall persuasiveness, this should not be read as a failure to appreciate the acute and lively sketches of the individual people which make up the core of the story he unfolds – Peabody at Groton, Eliot and Lowell as presidents of Harvard, Brewster and Clark as presidents of Yale, Woodrow Wilson and Charles Edwards as Presidents of Princeton, Bender, Heermance and Noyes as admissions deans in “The Big Three”. All these biographical essays are vivid illustrations of the history of admissions policies in the context of the culture of the American upper class. They give life and colour to what might otherwise have been a faceless statistical sociology of social selection into the most exclusive and prestigious circles of patrician and rich Americans.
Nevertheless, Karabel's sociology has its flaws. The concentration on HYP can be questioned. Not only are other private competitors like Dartmouth or Williams marginalised but the omission of Chicago or Stanford or Berkeley obscures not only the expansion westwards of a rapidly growing system of higher education, but also, in the case of California or Minnesota or Wisconsin, the challenge to Ivy league pre-eminence from the great public institutions.
European readers will also question the influence of what Karabel calls the external factors (alumni, the athletics department, organised minorities and especially “faculty” i.e. teachers and researchers on the staff of the university). Close reading makes it clear that Karabel sees the admissions staff as separate from if responsive to the president and the professors. In Europe on the other hand the history of admissions is typically one of struggles by academics to establish control over admissions. Thus for example, in Oxford and Cambridge the election of fellows on the basis of merit preceded the reform of student admissions so as to offer equal chances to Jews, non-conformists, women, and so on. Thus the British universities were able later to profit from the exodus of Jews from Nazi Germany. And critics all over the world will want to see a fuller treatment of graduate admissions which have grown proportionately faster in recent years than undergraduate admissions. A wider focus than one on HYP freshmen could probably tell us more than Karabel has done about the evolving connection between universities and social stratifications.
Attempts to demonstrate the global extent of Karabel's formulation can be traced back at least to Paul Windolf's suggestion at the University of Heidelberg in the 1980s. A résumé of research on social mobility was provided by Richard Breen in 2004 (Breen 2004) and a history of the European Universities has been accumulating over the past half century. This literature already provides evidence for the global character of Karabel's thesis but also reminds us that the variation in Europe with respect to educational expansion and absolute and relative mobility goes far beyond the special case of the USA.
In Europe as well as in the USA until 1945 the Universities were largely if not exclusively finishing schools for a minority of the well-to-do privileged or the strictly selected academically able, mostly men. But after World War II the system was to be transformed. The number of students in universities or other institutions of tertiary education had risen continuously until the present when the number of teachers is typically greater than was the number of students in 1945.
The drive by nation states was to widen access. Historically the problem had been seen in both East and West Europe as one of class. Initially the task was defined as one of redressing pre-war social inequality. Later it took the form of widening access for women, ethnic minorities and mature students. Only much later did it become clear that the traditional class project, in the sense of equalising relative class chances, had failed in both its Marxist and liberal versions. The forces of class and status remained formidably resistant. Nothing motivates middle class parents more, be they bourgeois or party functionaries, than the question of how to pass on their advantages to their own children. Karabel mentions that enlisting advice on how to secure entrance to HYP can cost a family $35,000. The cost of private preparatory schooling in Europe is comparable. There was, and is, the force of anti-market, guild or public service cultural traditions in Europe but it weakens as economic-liberal doctrines strengthen and education is reorganised on market lines.
European evidence confirms Karabel's thesis of class selectivity. For example, in Germany, Hungary and Sweden the upper service class appears to have given its children rather superior chances of educational survival. This finding fits with the observations of historians of the Bildungsbürgertum, a social stratum of civil servants, professionals and teachers in higher education, which has traditionally shared a set of common values associated with the experience of higher education and a relatively higher determination to pass on high standards of educational ambition and achievement to their children. The Bildungsbürgertum was probably most distinguished as a status group in Germany, but it also existed in other countries that were influenced by the German tradition of higher education, such as Sweden and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.
Conclusion
All over the world there is an almost frantic search for educational reform towards equality of opportunity. With respect to gender and ethnicity these efforts have succeeded. With respect to class, as Karabel has illustrated in the case of the USA, they have failed conspicuously. Not everything has been done in Europe or America to establish greater equality of condition, which again Karabel has pointed to in the USA. He is, of course, unconsciously repeating the criticism of capitalist society which R. H. Tawney formulated in his classic books of 1921 and 1931. The Acquisitive Society and Equality. Could we not go further along the Tawney path? Karabel is one of the very few American egalitarian sociologists. However he has two European heroes – Pierre Bourdieu and Michael Young, both unhappily now dead. But there are others in Europe like the veterans Robert Erikson, John Goldthorpe and Walter Mueller or younger sociologists like Adam Swift or Ben Jackson (Halsey 2007, Jackson 2008), in Britain or Jan Jonsson in Sweden who seek more equal social opportunities.
While in no way opposed to strategies seeking to reduce inequality of condition, these and other authors like the politicians, Roy Hattersley or Frank Field, would look for ways to reduce the variability of social rewards, for example by return to seriously progressive taxation of the rich and raising the level of minimum wages or extending the provision of citizen incomes. Such strategies would help to ease our endemic race towards competitive market success, reduce the widespread search by the middle and upper class for new and old defensive expenditure on education as a positional good and loosen the pressure on schools and colleges from preparing the next generation for livelihood rather than living. It is essential that social policy has to be directed not to maximising GNP but to securing the well-being of individuals in a secure society. Herein lies the modern challenge: to sociology, for a complex research programme aimed at solving the age-old problem of social inequality; and to politics, to discover the means to reach such a noble, global society.
