The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an opinion piece on the invisibility of social class in the college curriculum. Colleges Teach Gender and Race. They Ignore Class was written by the American Enterprise Institute/ Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College's Jon Shields and Corey Tazarra, associate professor of history at Scrips College.
With few exceptions, students are not encouraged to think deeply about class as a social structure, one that often separates them from Americans of all racial stripes. And they have almost no opportunity to encounter books that feature the world of non-college-educated white Americans in particular. This oversight is unfortunate, especially at a time when these voters are being mobilized against higher education.
It's a promising title and a promising analytical premise.
Yet by the end of the essay, I felt wary about sharing the article, thinking that the good of calling attention to the relative invisibility of social class in the curriculum is negated by so many other arguments that could make it more difficult to serve and to represent diverse students in higher education.
So I'm sharing the piece because it's very good to draw attention to the absence of opportunities to learn about social class. But I encourage wariness of how these authors frame their argument.
Be Wary of Word Search as Analysis
First, the project the authors describe is part of normalizing a practice (most often by conservative groups) of scanning course syllabi (or grant applications or scientific journal articles) for a small set of key words and then drawing broad conclusions from those word searches. We've seen how problematic these word searches of academic work have been when conducted by people who have little knowledge of the work in a field but are driven by particular political agendas.
The authors also describe using "a new data tool that extracts book titles from syllabi, allowing us to see how often they’re assigned and in what classes" (we might assume that this is some version of AI, though it's not clear why they're vague about this). The analysis was conducted at a single campus: The 85,000 syllabi of courses taught between 2011-25 at the University of Texas at Austin.
Be Wary About Erasing Most College Campuses in Discourse about "Colleges"
The authors do not explain why they chose one flagship campus in one state in which higher education curriculum is under conservative political pressure, but it does not serve the interests of poor and working-class students to continue to pretend that flagship campuses (or elite private campuses) represent "colleges".
I'll repeat that the point about the absence of social class in the curriculum is well-taken. And the title of the article about a single flagship campus is "colleges", plural. The broader trend of pundits ignoring regional state campuses and community colleges when they write about "higher education" works directly against the interests of the working-class by erasing the educational experiences of many students from public discourse. That erasure also means that these campuses constantly struggle for resources and for recognition about how higher education policy may work against them – yet another crisis of representation beyond omissions within the curriculum.
Be Wary About Who Defines What Counts as Class Analysis
The authors report searching for class-related key words in titles: “class,” “stratification,” “poverty,” or “inequality”. This search would have missed the course on education, social class, and social mobility that I taught for years: Education and the American Dream. It would also have missed courses that included analysis of social mobility, federal social safety nets, and or tax policies that favor the very wealthy. It would have missed classes on inequitable education funding, historical perspectives on college access, or the history or labor movements.
That search would have missed classes critiquing concentrations of wealth and the growing entanglement of wealth and political power.
I'm not arguing that there are likely many more course classes about social class in the curriculum than these authors found. It will be no surprise to readers of this site that I strongly advocate for deeper analysis of social class in the college curriculum and in co-curricular spaces.
I am cautioning – strongly – against normalizing the conservative fondness for searching massive numbers of syllabi using a limited number of key terms without any discussions with faculty or administrators, and without the humility to inquire about the language that specialized scholars use when teaching. I'm especially wary of authors who decline to subject their analysis to feedback before publication from the entities that they critique.
Actual advocacy for poor and working-class representation and for students likely would not start with a "gotcha" piece in the national press, especially absent any other work that either author is doing around social class equity in education.
Be Wary about Made Up Measures of Inclusion Masked as Objectivity
Because they acknowledge that course titles might miss some content, the authors go further to report on courses that included specific "influential texts" about social class in assigned readings. They write:
...we identified some of the most important works of social science on class, informed by our knowledge of the literature as well as citation counts. Additionally, we included JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy because of the political stature of the author. (bold added)
Given that neither author is a sociologist (where most research on social class is published) and that citation counts measure the inclusion of a work in published literature reviews – but also reflect both the length of time that something has been in print and the intensity of criticism of a work by other scholars – I'd be cautious about trusting their choices of "most important" based on citations.
Indeed the list of "most important" includes the often cited Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods (published 23 years ago), Paul Willis's Learning to Labor (published 50 years ago), Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, published 25 years ago.
The authors do not articulate reasons why faculty would continue to teach studies of social and political conditions of a generation (or more) ago, even if those studies have accumulated citations in historic overviews of a discipline in that span of time.
They've also obviously made personal choices here. They do not include bell hooks in this list, for example, perhaps because they do not consider that the work of a Black feminist could also be about social class. Yet her books Teaching to Transgress and Where We Stand: Class Matters are rich in class analysis, and each would be comfortably within the range of citations on their list of "most important" books about social class, had they been included. They do not make clear how they decided that a book advancing an argument against immigration in the context of the Brexit vote was included while none of hooks' books were.
Other books are less clearly about social class (Richard Florida's Cities and the Creative Class, for example). Joan Williams' The White Working Class, is included as a scholarly text about class, though Williams is a legacy Yale and Harvard-educated legal scholar who often stumbles when interpreting others' scholarship across the multiple social science disciplines from which she builds her case.
Vance's Hillbilly Elegy was never intended as a scholarly work, and the authors do not explain including it on this list beyond his "political stature". It is now common for candidates to release books as part of crafting a persona before launching campaigns and few are read in college classes.
Another clue about the limited conceptions of "class as a social structure" in this analysis is the absence of any books about the very privileged. Anthony Jack's The Privileged Poor, Seamus Khan's Privilege are just two studies of elite's exclusion of the less privileged in educational settings.
Jess Calarco's book Negotiating Opportunities on middle-class parents insisting on advantages for their children in schools to the detriment of working-class children has been cited more than 11 books that did make the "influential" texts on the list, but is not included. Richard Reeves' Dream Hoarders, an analysis of how the upper middle-class now hoards resources and opportunity for their own children, has been cited more than 6 of the "influential texts" on their list, but was not included.
Be Wary of Assertions of Zero Sum in the Curriculum
Race
The authors attempt to document how many courses on race and gender UT Austin has offered. In a chart, they report the number of courses on race, gender, justice, and class across time, as if scholars understand (and teach about) these as distinct categories.
They critique courses on race for excluding "the most prominent Black social scientists who write on race from nonradical perspectives". "Nonradical" is of course not an objective term.
On this list of books they would instead have students read, they include William Julius Wilson's 1987 book The Truly Disadvantaged, and a 1999 book of essays about the legacies of slavery.
The exclusion of these dated books, they argue, is evidence of the marginalization of "so many prominent Black social scientists" as if the only reason that colleges no longer teach books on social conditions a generation ago is ideological.
Gender
The authors document how many classes UT Austin offers on gender and then argue, at this political moment in which we're witnessing major job losses for women and the public denigration, assault, and exclusion of women in US politics:
Like race, gender is an important topic. But universities might also reflect on the justification for having something like 20 times as many courses on gender than class. Since the 1970s, our class divisions have increased, while many gender gaps have diminished. Just look around college campuses. A majority of college graduates are women, while comparatively few hail from poor or working-class backgrounds.
Again, we can agree that there should be so many more courses in which students can learn more about the US class structure and about structural class inequalities. And we can – and should – make that argument without wrapping it in claims that we've accomplished gender equality or in unsubstantiated claims that there are few poor or working-class students on a given campus. And we can absolutely make the argument for more coursework on class without erasing the 20% of undergraduate women students who are single mothers, often living at the poverty level, often women of color, because gender and race and class are not distinct categories.
Be Wary About Blaming Curriculum for Broader Policy Failures
If we do want to talk about how "class as a social structure" works, we need to talk about what a powerful elite is now doing to limit college access for poor and working-class students. We need to talk about cuts in federal Pell grants, about tolerance for unequal funding for public high schools, about a conservative agenda that defines college as a private rather than a public good so that states have cut the tuition subsidies that built public higher education systems. We need to talk about the current Department of Education cutting funding for TRIO and other college pipeline programs.
We might ask the authors where classes on social class might be taught as campuses are cutting sociology departments, the humanities, and other liberal arts programs.
If we're concerned about under-representation or scholars from poor and working-class backgrounds on college faculty, we could talk about budget constraints leading to campuses now hiring more part-time and contingent faculty than tenure track faculty, placing academic careers out of reach for scholars without family resources to tide them over as they patch together enough courses to cover the rent.
We need to talk about cuts to federal grants for social science research that fund emerging scholars as they learn to interrogate all of these things.
All of these policy choices are object lessons in "class as a social structure". In my field, we talk about both the formal curriculum and the hidden curriculum and nothing in the academic records of either of these authors indicates any concern for the latter.
Yes to More Curricular Representation, As Part of Broader Equity-Based Reform
No essay has to address every obstacle to the access and success of poor and working-class students, but these authors advance a political agenda that focuses on the low-hanging fruit of curriculum while ignoring all the ways federal and state governments are placing college beyond the reach of many students.
Admittedly, it's easier to run a batch of syllabi though AI and to then claim that work as being in the interests of poor and working-class people than to ask anyone working with these students where the greatest roadblocks might be and what might be done to remove them. Even when focusing on a single campus, as these authors do, there is no mention if any constructive engagement with faculty about curriculum development.
The authors are correct that there is too little attention to social class in the curriculum. Completely.
Yet they seem not to be acting entirely in good faith about supporting faculty, staff, and students in developing opportunities to learn about social class inequalities.
But in the end, faculty and administrators holding broader and deeper commitments to justice and equity would do well to finally begin their own work on ensuring that students leave college informed about deep and worsening social class inequalities. It's deeply unfortunate that academics with no prior work on social class equity, funded by conservative think tanks that work against equity and access, have taken the lead on this.
Thanks to Betsy Leondar-Wright for sending me this piece in the spirit of our mutual frustration with the invisibility of social class across college campuses.
