Class, capital, and competing academic discourse: a critical analysis of the mission/s of American higher education

Abstract

In this paper, we critically analyze institutional mission statements as discursive texts replete with symbolic meaning, as we believe these texts reveal a great deal about the ways in which higher education remains increasingly stratified. We argue that beneath the generalized rhetoric of institutional mission statements, lie powerful messages seemingly coded with varying forms of class-based academic capital. We further argue that these messages reflect two distinct, competing discourses surrounding the purpose and value of higher education, that parallel the stratification of the larger system itself. Findings reveal evidence of these competing discourses and contribute to larger discussions surrounding educational inequality.

Keywords:

• social class
• academic capital
• discourse
• higher education
• social stratification
• educational inequality

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their incredibly thoughtful feedback and Julia Colyar for her generous insights on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

1. For our purposes, an ‘elite’ institution is defined by its position within the field of higher education. Because American higher education relies so heavily upon popular ranking systems as a determinant of quality, we use rankings, which rely upon reputation and selectivity (markers of prestige), to define elite institutional status. ‘Elite’ institutions comprise the highest-ranking institutions.

2. Vocational education is a notion that has become incredibly nuanced within contemporary systems of higher education. Within the USA, though vocational education was once the primary focus of two-year colleges, more recent social and economic shifts have increased the need for universities and colleges to provide an increasing number of programs offering job-related skills and more practical, applied forms of knowledge. However, researchers have also identified the over-emphasis within lower-tier institutions to promote the ‘practical arts’ (Brint, Riddle, Turk-Bicakci, & Levy, 2005) while upper-tier institutions arguably continue to emphasize more elite forms of knowledge (e.g. traditional liberal arts education).

3. Habitus, one of Bourdieu's core relational concepts, can be defined as ‘a system of lasting and transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 19).

4. Viewbooks, popular in North America, are publications often produced by marketing firms on behalf of colleges and universities to ‘sell’ institutions to potential students. A viewbook provides attractive, full-color images of a campus, its offerings (e.g. programs, course offerings), and institutional characteristics (e.g. institutional type, location, diversity of student population, and so forth). As marketing materials, viewbooks present an ideal image of campus life at each particular institution.

5. Because this research did not involve human participants, but instead publicly available documents as the data source, it was exempt from review by the Institutional Review Boards at the authors’ respective institutions.

6. Specifically, both authors independently examined the 60 mission statements to identify the elements (i.e. explicitly expressed ideas and concepts) contained within them. Subsequently, together the authors developed a formal codebook containing a list of 93 elements and definitions for each. Using the codebook, the authors then independently coded the 60 mission statements. To evidence inter-rater reliability in analyzing the 60 mission statements, we computed the percent agreement for each code. Across the 93 codes, the percentage agreement ranged from 52% to 100% (with a mean of 87% and a median of 90%). Since the percent agreement was suboptimal for some codes, refinements were then made to the codebook (e.g. collapsing of similar, conceptually related categories), resulting in a total of 84 codes that were applied to a collaborative analysis of the mission statements.

7. We implemented the Yates’ correction for continuity correction when greater than 20% of cells had expected values less than 5, with the understanding that this procedure can overcorrect resulting in an overly conservative test.

8. We do so with the understanding that ideology is not simply masking a reality available to the critical analyst.

9. The authors acknowledge that discourse does not fully constitute or fully explain the social world. Fairclough (2006) rightly warns us not to take ‘the argument too far’ or ‘social life comes to be seen as nothing but discourse’ (p. 142).

10. While a supplemental analysis showed that liberal arts institutions tend to have more elements in their missions, on average, than national universities, F(1,56) = 7.43, p <.01, there was no difference by tier F(1,56) = 1.25, p = .27. This suggests that the greater prevalence of six of these seven elements in the tier 1 institutions’ mission statements is not an artifact of more general differences in the mission statements by tier (i.e. length).

11. This is not to say that the authors assess institutional quality through noted difference; rather, we suggest that institutional mission statements differ across tiers in the ways they express what it means to provide a quality education.

12. Quality itself should be understood as a deeply problematic and questionable context for these missions – wrapped up in the loud and all-too-appealing discourse of institutional rankings. The noise produced by these systems drowns out quieter critiques of US ranking systems (e.g. US News and World Report) – those that point to rankings as flawed, unreliable measures of quality (Brooks, 2005; Dichev, 2001). Because rankings are often conflated with quality, they have been empirically found to have a significant influence on students as they select potential colleges and universities (Bowman & Bastedo, 2009).

13. For Bourdieu, the word strategy refers to ‘the active deployment of objectively oriented “lines of action” that obey regularities and form coherent and socially intelligible patterns, even though they do not follow conscious rules or aim at the premeditated goals posited by a strategist’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 25). Relative to the space of higher education, Naidoo (2004) explains: ‘Agents and institutions individually or collectively implement strategies in order to improve or defend their positions in relations to other occupants’ (p. 459).