How do people explain their moral decisions to participate in projects that unfairly benefit a small number of privileged people while harming others?
A fair amount has been written about how college admissions processes replicate socio-economic inequalities (some of which I've written about here). Other studies have explored privileged' parents' investments in purchasing advantages for their own children.
Now, an intriguing new study explores the bridge between privileged families and institutions: the growing number of private college and preschool admissions counselors that privileged families hire to help their children to get into exclusive schools. As they market their services to privileged parents, how do these professionals understand their roles within deeply unequal systems?
Authors Huang and Diaz ask:
By examining how admissions consultants understand their work, we seek to explain not whether they produce inequality, but rather how inequality is justified. These justifications help explain how inequality itself endures even when subjected to criticism (Boltanski and Thévenot 1999).
Across dozens of interviews, these consultants speak of themselves as altruistic. The college admissions consultants describe their work as being less about families paying for competitive advantage than as finding the best fit for students in college selection. Consultants hired to help parents to get their children into elite pre-K programs in New York City spoke of themselves as parenting consultants who could advise parents on how to help their children develop fine motor or language skills (especially those that admissions staff would value).
Consultants favorably compared themselves to less ethical peers, did limited pro bono work, described themselves as similar to tutors or accountants who just offer "extra help" based on individual needs.
Huang and Diaz make clear that the consultants in this exploding field are not themselves responsible for the educational inequalities they work within.
But the article is a fascinating account of the stories we tell ourselves when grappling with our own roles in sustaining persistent class inequalities.
Structural inequalities are grounded in policy decisions but play out through millions of social interactions that normalize advantage and disadvantage, that deflect responsibility for change, and that justify systems that replicate inequalities as just "good parenting" or "meeting the needs of students".
But as we know, only some parents get to live up to their own ideals of being a "good parents", and the needs of many students are never met.
