Выходные данные статьи:
Kamens, David. Colleges and Elite Formation: The Case of Prestigious American Colleges, Sociology of Education, Vol. 47, Issue 3 (Summer, 1974), pp. 354-378.
Colleges and Elite Formation: The
Case of Prestigious American
Colleges
David Kamens
Northern Illinois University
This paper presents an argument on the conditions under which colleges will be able to affect the role allocation of students. This view emphasizes that colleges may differ in the kinds of people they are expected to produce and in the kinds of changes in individuals that they can legitimately expect to affect. This general model called the 'charter' is examined with reference to one class of American colleges i.e., academically prestigious schools. After discussing the cultural distribution of goals and functions among colleges, we develop a set of hypotheses on the effects of college prestige on student occupational choice and dropout decisions. Empirical evidence from panel data on students sampled from 99 American colleges is presented in support of the hypotheses.
It is common among sociologists to view educational institutions as major role-allocating devices in modem society that connect adolescents with future adult occupational roles and status. This view in turn had led to lively interest and wash research at all levels of education on the question of whether educational organizations have autonomous influences on a variety of important role choices that students make. This paper develops an argument about the conditions under which colleges will have an impact on student role decisions, and attempts to illustrate it by examining one class of American colleges, i.e., academically prestigious schools, and exploring their impacts on two kinds of studen&aaSecisions: (1) occupational choices and; (2) the decision to remain a member of their college.
Our major premise is that colleges can effectively change students only in directions that are validated by the wider society. One can conceive of this right to change people as a license or a mandate that is granted to particular organizations by its societal constituents. Meyer (1970) has called this mandate the organizational charter, and we will adopt this term. He argues that:
Any socializing organization has crucial features which lie largely outside its own structure and which constitute its relationship with its social setting. One such feature-perhaps the most important-is the social definitions of the products of the organization.. If for example, everyone knows that a particular school or class of schools (i.e., colleges) produces successful people, and if they know that others-employers, professional gatekeepers–know and accept this, then the school has acquired an invaluable resource in transforming its pretests. (Meyer, 1970a: 9)
This argument emphasizes that colleges and other socializing agencies vary not only in the social characteristics of their clientele and in their treatment environments, but also in the beliefs that important external elites hold about the kinds of changes they can and should produce in their recruits. These beliefs and stereotypes in turn affect the opportunities that graduates from these schools will actually have. To take a dramatic case outside the field of education, consider the effects of prison on the future life chances of ex-convicts. That organizations can be "licensed" to stigmatize people positively and negatively must go without saying.
The point is that societal elites set constraints not only on the resources available to educational institutions but also on the normative authority such organizations have to change people. Institutions which try to change people in ways that are not within their recognized authority, may find that their products, and perhaps themselves, are treated as deviants. It is clear, for example, that the production of student radicals has become unacceptable to many important clients of American universities, notably state and federal legislators. In short, clients of higher education impose cultural as well as resource limitations on the socialization outcomes of colleges.
This view of socialization indicates that colleges can produce major changes in students only when there is widespread agreement among important sectors of society on the kinds of people that given sets of schools produce. Where such cultural definitions of the efficacy of all or given sets of colleges are lacking, the effects of a school in changing students in any given direction are likely to be severely limited. This argument may help to explain why research on colleges to date has found either no or very small college effects on major areas of role choice, despite the fact that there are major differences among colleges in treatment environments and in the socializing resources available to them (For a summary of research see Feldman and Newcomb, 1969; Davis, 1966).
We wish to suggest here that colleges have different kinds of charters, depending upon the cultural beliefs and values of their historical constituencies in the wider society. To illustrate the general argument we will look at one class of colleges in American society, i.e., high prestige schools, and explore their effects on student motivation and role decisions. The first step in the argument will be to justify the use of prestige as a measure of a particular kind of charter. Then we formulate a set of hypotheses on the expected impact of this class of elite colleges on students' role decisions. We will use two kinds of decisions that students make during the course of college: (1) the type of occupation they wish to enter; and (2) whether they will remain a student at their particular college. These are two of the most important decisions students must make concerning their present situation and their future. Needless to say, our argument on the effects of prestige assumes that individual characteristics of students are held constant.
It is necessary here to justify the use of prestige as an indicator of the 'charter' concept and to specify just what kind of 'charter' such schools possess. Prestige represents a generalized belief among the academic community as to which colleges are closest to the central values of the community, i.e., intellectual work and the creation of knowledge, which are on the periphery, and which are marginal to these core values. These communal definitions are likely to be transmitted to and shared with other important societal elites outside academia, i.e., government, foundations, and business elites. We suggest that this description or belief about given colleges constitutes a 'charter' which has important implications for the distribution of research functions and goals among colleges and has, in turn, consequences for the strength of faculty authority within colleges. Two points need to be emphasized. First, the distribution of research goals and functions rests largely on the judgments of academic and other elites over which colleges will get and deserve such societal resources and legitimation. Such decisions tend to be made about colleges as units, since the prestige ratings of individual departments are highly correlated (cf. Kamens, 1972, on this point). In short, colleges are 'chartered' to engage in research and act as research training centers. Second, the dominance of research and research training goals, as opposed to teaching and service orientations, in turn affects both the actual and the symbolic structure of faculty roles (cf. Gross, 1968: 536ff, on the relation between prestige and faculty goals). The distribution of research and training goals among colleges has a number of structural and cultural consequences on organizational life, which we elaborate in a forthcoming paper, but we wish here to emphasize one: its effect on the structure of the student role.
In research oriented universities teaching objectives vis-a-vis students become organized around the goal of training future scholars and researchers (cf. Gross, 1968: 535). While this may create pressures to weed out incompetent students by continually raising standards, as Davis (1966) has suggested, it also means that the student role becomes clearly defined symbolically in the organizational culture by 'significant others'–faculty, administrators, graduate schools, etc. Because of the clarity and legitimacy of organizational purposes, the meaning of the student role can be coherently defined and linked with the overall research and training objectives of the college. This defining process, however, also has its negative side, as many have noted. While it clarifies the symbolic content of the student role, it has also meant a narrowing of the responsibilities and objectives of the college towards students. Moral socialization has given way to 'academic' socialization, and this trend has probably been more pronounced at the most prestigious colleges (cf. Gross, 1968: 536; also the case study of Vreeland and Bidwell, 1966; Theissen and Iutcovich, 1970).
Our argument about prestige is intended to assert and document as well as possible two main points: (1) that it is a measure of a rather limited kind of 'charter' that is differentially allocated by academic and other societal elites among universities; and (2) that the allocation of these culturally defined functions among institutions has an important impact on their ability to develop and maintain a special sense of mission, especially vis-a-vis students. Clark (1970; 1971) has called this special organizational identity and tradition a 'saga.' Our argument has sought to indicate the connection between the rather specialized 'sagas' or purposes, associated with college prestige, and the societal distribution of research and scholarly training functions. The major point argued is that the organizational culture and ensuing symbolic conceptions of the student role are heavily dependent for validity on these larger cultural allocation processes (cf. also Reisman, Gusfield, and Gamson, 1971, on this general problem).
How then does college prestige affect student occupational role choices? We expect that faculty at prestigious colleges will have the cultural authority to influence students' occupational decisions toward those careers sanctioned by the values of academic culture. Specifically, we should find that elite colleges allocate more students to scientific and scholarly careers, irrespective of students' initial career choices and other personal characteristics. This shifting will occur despite the fact that high prestige colleges are known to have higher academic standards (Davis, 1966; Kamens, 1968). Conversely, this argument implies that elite colleges will also move students away from other high status occupations not highly valued by the academic culture, i.e., careers in the traditional 'free' professions.
Since the idea of 'charter' indicates cultural and structural connections to specific elites, rather than a broad linkage to high prestige statuses in general, we do not expect high prestige colleges to have an impact on student's general status ambitions. This view is consistent with most recent research which has found little or no effects of college quality, or prestige, on the occupational prestige level of students' aspirations (cf. Spaeth, 1968; Meyer, 1970b; Drew and Astin, 1972).
These hypotheses follow from the previous argument that academic values tend to dominate the culture of high prestige colleges and that faculty tend to be defined as the symbolic representatives of the organization and its purposes. From this view, whether or not faculty actually exercise extensive decision-making power in these colleges is irrelevant. What matters is that students perceive the organization through the 'eyes' of their teachers and attach legitimacy to these perspectives and purposes. Underlying this argument is the premise that this special group of colleges constitute cultural communities rather than bureaucracies and that students perceive" and define the student status in terms of the prevailing communal values and purposes rather than in terms of bureaucratic definitions of the functional rationality of given programs and curricula.[1]
The argument on occupational effects also leads to a set of hypotheses about the impact of high prestige colleges on attrition.[2] 'It should be noted that we are not trying here to account for the well known fact that such colleges have lower dropout rates (cf. Astin, 1969). Rather we are interested in exploring some dynamics of this decision-making process. The major idea to be examined is that commitment to a career sanctioned by the culture of the college will increase students' attachment to the organizational status. This argument assumes that such students will feel more attracted to and dependent on the organizational career, both because its culture is an important source of support for their own ambitions and because it is also an important structure in which to achieve these aspirations. Our first expectation, then, is that students with academic and scientific career ambitions will drop out less at high prestige colleges than students with other types of career ambitions. Secondly, because of differences between colleges in support for scholarly career ambitions, prestige should have the most influence on the dropout rates of this group of students. However, one other process associated with prestige may disrupt some of these simple predictions. Given the culture of high prestige colleges, more importance and emphasis may be placed on intellectual competence by faculty and other students (cf. Kamens, 1968, for some evidence on this). Hence, the meaning attached to grades and other symbols of competence may be affected by prestige, as well as the actual distribution of these rewards. In short, the reward value of academic symbols may differ among schools, particularly for aspiring scholars and scientists. We will attempt to test this possibility as well as the other hypotheses.
In sum, our argument attempts to show the special but limited influence prestigious colleges have on student role choices and also why in general the differential resource distribution among colleges has so little influence on such choices.
The plan of analysis is as follows: After discussing the data, we turn directly to the impact of prestige on occupational decisions. Next we examine the differential authority of faculty among colleges. Then we consider the influence of college prestige and occupational choice on student dropout decisions.
Research Design and Data
The data come from a large national survey conducted in 1963 (Bowers, 1964). From each college in a sample representative of the diversity of American education (N = 99) random samples of 50-75 students were drawn from each college class (Bowers, 1964: Appendix C; Kamens, 1968: Appendix A). The large number of colleges, and students, allows us to estimate the effect of institutional characteristics on student behavior, independent of student input.
Data on individual characteristics and behavior comes from students in the Bowers' study who were freshmen in the year 1962-63. In that study, 2,405 freshmen men and women were identified from the college directories and sent questionnaires. Of this number, 1,665 (69 percent) actually returned the questionnaire. One half of these respondents are men. The reason for studying the 1963 freshmen is that they are the only group for which we have dropout information and panel data on occupational choice.
Data on dropout and ability were collected from the college registrars in the spring of 1966 for all students. We defined as dropouts those members of the sample who had left college any time during the four year period between 1962 and 1966, whether or not they transferred to another college. We do not assume that those who dropped out had ended their educational careers (cf. Eckland, 1964). The dropout rate for the sample of respondents (1,665) 38 percent – very close to that for the total sample (2,405) where the dropout rate is 40 percent. All 99 schools cooperated in sending us data on dropout.
Two points need to be made about our definition of dropout. First, since we are interested in the holding power of colleges, and not individual dropout, the inclusion of transfers in the sample of dropout is useful. In the analysis of between school variance, as opposed to within school variance, both student transfer and dropout reflect the retention effects of colleges. Second, this definition of dropout is useful for the present purposes, given the fact that we are not interested in the demographic problem of how many and what types of students finish higher education in four years.
Our academic ability index is composed of two items: verbal ability scores on a number of college entrance tests, e.g., SAT, ACE, and cumulative high school grade average. Data on entering test scores are available for 1,239: 52 percent of the total sample (N =2,405) and 50 percent of the sample of respondents. Data on high school grades is available for all respondents. Only four colleges refused to cooperate and did not send us data on students' ability scores.[3]
The data for the panel analysis of occupational choice are composed of those freshmen respondents in 1962-63 (N = 1,665) who returned follow-up questionnaires sent to them in the spring of 1966 when most of them were seniors. Nine hundred and forty-six students returned the follow-up–a response rate of 57 percent. The response rate for males and females was 54 percent and 59 percent respectively. Ability data from college registrars is available for 60 percent of the students in this sample. For a complete description of this subsample, cf. Meyer (1970b).