Amy J. Binder

Career Funneling How Elite Students Learn to Define and Desire ‘‘Prestigious’’ Jobs

Elite universities are credited as launch points for the widest variety of meaningful careers. Yet, year after year at the most selective universities, nearly half the graduating seniors head to a surprisingly narrow band of professional options. Over the past few decades, this has largely been into the finance and consulting sectors, but increasingly it also includes high-tech firms. This study uses a cultural-organizational lens to show how student cultures and campus structures steer large portions of anxious and uncertain students into high-wealth, high-status occupational sectors. Interviewing 56 students and recent alumni at Harvard and Stanford Universities, we found that the majority of our respondents experienced confusion about career paths when first arriving at college but quickly learned what were considered to be the most prestigious options. On-campus corporate recruitment for finance, consulting, and high-tech jobs functioned as a significant driver of student perceptions of status; career prestige systems built up among peers exacerbated the funneling effect into these jobs. From these processes, students learned to draw boundaries between ‘‘high-status’’ and ‘‘ordinary’’ jobs. Our findings demonstrate how status processes on college campuses are central in generating preferences for the uppermost positions in the occupational structure and that elite campus environments have a large, independent role in the production and reproduction of social inequality.

Selling Students: The Rise of Corporate Partnership Programs in University Career Centers

Abstract This study documents a new case of the further commercialization of the university, the rapid adoption of corporate partnership programs (CPPs) within centralized university career services departments. CPPs function as a type of headhunting agency. For an annual fee they facilitate a corporate hiring department’s direct access to student talent, allowing the company to outsource much of its hiring tasks to the university career center. CPPs are a feature found predominantly, though not exclusively, on campuses where there is a highly rationalized logic around the economic benefits of academic science. Further, CPPs represent a commercialization of practice that is in tension with the student-development mission of traditional career counselors. Using an inhabited institutionalist approach, we show how the models differ and how staff on each side attempt to negotiate their competing roles in the multiversity environment. We also discuss some of the potential impact on students, on the career services profession, and on college-to-work pathways.

Sociology of Education’s Cultural, Organizational, and Societal Turn:

How many trenchant observations can one essay contain? The answer is ‘‘enviably many’’ if the subject is the purview of contemporary American sociology of education and the author is Steven Brint, at the end of his term as chair of the American Sociological Association section of the same name. While other scholars have leveled similar charges that our field is diminished by its overriding concerns with educational achievement and access, studied quantitatively, Brint’s piece is resonant because it covers so much ground in such short order, and he doesn’t sound like he has a case of sour grapes. He just thinks that we can do better in the future. Several of Brint’s articulations are powerful: We are more a sociology of schooling than we are of education. We focus more on how society shapes education than how education shapes societal forces. We are drawn more to the study of K–12 than to the study of higher education. Because most of my own work is at odds with what Brint calls the ‘‘collective mind’’ of sociology of education, from content to methods, I’d like to offer a few observations in kind. First, to Brint’s call for more culture, more society, and more higher education (preferably in combination), I would argue that in the years since this essay was published, things have changed quite dramatically, if not in article form, then at least in books. Over the past five years, Mitchell Stevens, Ann Mullen, Jenny Stuber, Ruben Gatzambide-Fernández, Shamus Khan, Joseph Soares, Neil Gross, Richard Arum, Josipa Roksa, Kate Wood, and I, among others, have turned our gaze to college campuses (or, in two of these cases, elite boarding schools) and, in varying ways, have studied how organizational and cultural features of campuses indelibly shape the people who study on them, with attendant larger social consequences. Although inequality in access and outcomes is never far from the surface in these studies (I am quite certain that the concept of ‘‘reproduction of advantage’’ is used by all, to a greater or lesser extent), these authors come at stratification from unconventional directions and are centrally concerned with the mechanisms and processes by which education produces multiple types of selves. Conservatives become right in distinctive ways; affluent undergraduates become voracious partiers; prep students become meritocratically elite; large public university students go adrift. Authors in this group look at the multiple levels of meaning that inform students’ understandings of themselves (from the most micro of their family background to the most macro of popular culture images of the ‘‘typical American college experience’’), and they cast an especially probing eye to the distinctive organizational arrangements on campuses (what we might call the meso level) that enable and constrain possibilities for certain types of transformation or enhancement. They also look, for the most part, at how these understandings are shared culture, created in interaction with others. In his book Privilege, for example, Khan (2010) tells us of the hierarchical chapel seating at St. Paul’s School that helps students know their rightful place in the pecking order, no matter their humble or elite origins. In Paying for the Party, Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton (2013) talk about the easy majors and housing options offered by Midwest U that enable upper-middle-