Abstract
Drawing upon data from an ethnography of college admissions, I describe how the admissions’ personnel and faculty mobilize persuasive scripts that invite prospective students to reimagine themselves as subjects with a fluid set of aspirations within the context of risky futures. The focus here is not on the representations of the college itself, rather on how potential students’ aspirational subjectivities can be folded into enduring institutional scripts. Reciprocally, the institution is potentially folded into the students’ narrative of self. In persuasive scripts of commensuration, disparate futures and knowledge are made similar: students who imagine themselves embedded in the social world of nursing are acquired by social work programs; potential social workers are acquired by the school for business and so on. I argue here that the fluidity of such imagined futures is directly implicated in neoliberal discourses that require the subject to assertively colonize the future, despite the actual probabilities of such aspirations coming to fruition. This entire process is set against the backdrop of an unstable, higher education marketplace, where college admissions officers and recruiters are required to cushion the institution from the vicissitudes of market conditions.
Success is near
On an August afternoon in 2009 I stumbled upon a chalkboard as I was wandering through the halls of Ravenwood College.
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The space itself was little more than an alcove with a table and some stackable chairs; it was at the end of a hallway that exited the campus property, behind lockers, a drinking fountain, and a small room where security guards would change into their uniforms. I had seen students using the space to study, eat meals, or just relax between classes. It was convenient not only because it was somewhat private but also because of the mobile chalkboard. At this particular moment there were no students, but a message had been left scrawled on the board: “Success Is Near … ” Even during fieldwork, the poignancy of the statement struck me as so interesting that I snapped a picture with my cellular phone (see Figure 1).
Photograph of chalkboard at Ravenwood College, taken by the author.
Each word was entirely capitalized, like the title of a story. The words captured for me the hope and aspiration of a student body struggling to find their place in a risk-laden, neoliberal 2 landscape.
The words also spoke volumes about the campus context and climate that remained energized by Barack Obama’s first election, and benefited from the possibilities that Obama’s achievements seemed to open up for African Americans. In August 2009 there was less anxiety about the value of higher education than there is currently in 2015. The “Occupy Movement” had not yet sent throngs of unemployed college-age students onto the streets, only to slowly retreat later into the margins. It was also not clear that partisan politics would continue to polarize the US political discourse, or that the presidency would be not quite progressive enough for some on the political left. The campaign slogan: “Yes We Can” had become “Yes We Did.” At one point during the Ravenwood commencement ceremony in May 2009, the crowds of students and families began to spontaneously chant in unison: “Yes we did. Yes we did.” Justice Sotomayor had been sworn into office. Possibility was in the air, and Ravenwood was tantalized by it. Aaron, one of the admission counselors at Ravenwood, proudly displayed his copy of President Obama’s autobiography The Audacity of Hope on his shelf. On another day I encountered a male African American applicant in the office of admissions who had dropped out of Ravenwood nearly a decade earlier and was now returning. Why return now, I asked? “Barack Obama,” he had replied.
Ravenwood College was a non-profit, commuter college for working adults, most of whom were African American women (about 75% of the student body were women and about 91% of the student body were students of color). It was located in a single, nondescript building with a large parking lot at the back––not a broad campus with oak trees and classical buildings. There were no dorms, athletics, or sororities, and the library was bordering on tiny. There were only a few undergraduate majors and graduate degree programs, but Ravenwood’s progressive mission 3 touched them all in some way. As many faculty members and students mentioned, there was a “special spirit” at Ravenwood, and the historical moment of Obama’s election resonated with that spirit. The admissions team was required to recruit students into this community and drew on a variety of scripts 4 to do so; among these was the political discourse of hope that was thriving in 2008–2009. It was necessary to devise such persuasive scripts because Ravenwood, as an institution, held a precarious position in the marketplace.
Such scripts needed to be refined in the face of economic crisis. In 2002 Ravenwood had been relatively prosperous, with nearly 2400 students enrolled across the five sites, but enrollment fell during the subsequent six years. By 2008 the college had stabilized at approximately 1600 students, but for a small, tuition-driven college like this one, there were severe consequences to such fluctuations in enrollment. Extension campuses were closed, and in 2006 110 staff and five professors were made redundant. By the time of my study in 2008–2009, only the main campus remained. Although few members of the admissions team had been employed at Ravenwood when those events took place, memory was fresh among faculty and campus leadership; the consequences for low enrollments were tangible. While the economic crisis was hitting everyone else, Ravenwood was just beginning to recover. Nevertheless, a shroud of anxiety seemed to hover over the institution. Surviving a difficult fiscal moment in its recent history had highlighted how important it was that Ravenwood manage future risks, which required recruiting students. Persuasive recruitment scripts and marketing images were being deployed to that end and seemed to suggest that students could cultivate a future self at Ravenwood that would be prosperous, upwardly mobile, and by implication, happy. Failure to cultivate such understandings among prospective students could threaten the institution’s continued existence. But was success “near?” For students at Ravenwood, the question was important.
My goal in this article, however, is not to determine whether or not success was near, but rather to describe how individuals at Ravenwood crafted an argument that it was. I make here several overlapping arguments about college recruitment vis-à-vis the materials/activity I encountered ethnographically at Ravenwood College. In terms of recruitment materials, I focus on some of Ravenwood’s video commercials and print advertisements. The recruitment activity described includes spoken arguments for enrollment made by the faculty and staff at two targeted open house events: one focused on the Latino community and one focused on the homeless. I argue that, through these materials and activities, Ravenwood College folds a particular imagined future self into institutional narratives and possibilities, and that being able to bring such narratives together successfully is critical for Ravenwood to manage the future risks of its fiscal integrity. The particular ways that Ravenwood fold narratives into one another, such as drawing on the political discourse of hope, described above, is configured by the institutional context: its mission, history, setting, financial situation, student population, position in the rankings, etc. I further argue that this imagined future self is one deeply implicated in neoliberal understandings of personhood, profession, and aspiration. The particular circumstances that Ravenwood faces are a product of its history, organizational culture, structure, position in the rankings, program offerings, etc., and the scripts deployed are likewise particular to this site. I do argue, however, that other institutions of higher education that are subject to the vicissitudes of the marketplace (and in the context of American post-secondary education, this is most of them) must perceive their economic position as risky, and thus must craft persuasive scripts that emerge from their own circumstances. As such, other institutions engage in similarly persuasive arguments in which prospective students are folded into an imagined, future, successful self. The case of Ravenwood represents a detailed analysis of how one institution struggles with making the argument that most colleges need to make: that future risk can be managed and that success is the result of individual choices, first to attend college, and second to attend this college in particular. Finally, I highlight the moral concerns with higher education as a capitalist enterprise as voiced by Ravenwood admissions counselors who attempted to demarcate ethical boundaries of practice for themselves as they reconciled the progressive mission of Ravenwood with the need to promote the school.
Managing the future of/through higher education: personhood, profession, and success
Humanity’s social, material, and personal constructions are shaped by temporal understandings and projections toward the future, and the social field of college recruitment and admissions is nested in such orientations toward the future. While in the West, the university has always been a space for the production of elites, shifts in the ways that credentials are utilized in the economy and the increasing costs associated with higher education have reconfigured the university as an investment. The entire enterprise of higher education can be understood as an investment in the future, an orientation deeply centered in the project that is each of our lives where we polish and blend our knowledge and personhood into a single, marketable product. Under the neoliberal ideology of endless market-based growth, we must continually update, upgrade, and retrofit our “self-as-project” to respond to market needs. The self becomes an always-future project, never to be actualized but which may cushion us from the increasingly erratic vicissitudes of the economy. In many ways, higher education is in the business of the future self.
The relationship between the self, the future, and success has been well laid out in works that focus on various aspects of modernity and more recently, neoliberalism. Demerath et al. (2008 and further elaborated in Demerath, 2009) point out that high-achieving students are described in terms of being “oriented toward control and individual advancement” (Demerath et al., 2008: 271). Demerath et al. position this work within the context of the formation and promulgation of the neoliberal self in response to what Mitchell et al. (2003) describe as: “the economic devolution associated with neoliberalism … which brings the logic of the rational market to all aspects of life and in so doing redefines the nexus of the economic and the social” (Mitchell et al., 2003: 418). As such, personal and social choices are understood through a market framework and as part of a project to “colonize the future” (Giddens, 1991). According to Giddens (1991), in the late modern era, individuals exert control over fragmented lives by asserting coherent identities through choices and narratives about themselves. In contrast to post-structuralist thinkers who tend to suggest an ethically hollow, fragmented existence, Giddens (1991) allows for an identity that coheres around resolving dilemmas and asserting a position in the future, which aligns with the focus on individual choice in neoliberal contexts. Of course, beyond the self-determined agency that identity implies, I draw here upon an understanding of subjectivity as emerging from complex landscapes that acknowledge a degree of agency, situated enactment, and socio-political structures. Thus, in the college search process, prospective college students are compelled to make choices about and invest in their futures in ways that impose a fantasy of order and control on their own lives.
These orientations toward choice and the self, however, also suggest an understanding of the future as a risky enterprise to be managed. Both Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) and Giddens (1998) have elaborated this vision of modernity to be characterized by intensive competition and manufactured or perceived risk––all of which require individuals to proactively think about and manage their own uncertain futures. Or, as Bialostok and Whitman (2012): Risk thinking [emphasis in original] is a way (or a set of different ways) of bringing future present and rendering it into a calculable form. It is the form of calculation about reality, rather than the ‘naturally’ occurring reality, that is the heart of risk (Bialostok and Whitman, 2012: 12).
Foucault’s governmentality suggests an entire array of techniques of social control, including those that are deeply internalized to promote the social order, for example, “technologies of the self.” Building on this, Bialostok and Whitman (2012) further see these attempts to manage risk as central to both education as an institution and to the individual’s understanding of skills and competencies, arguing that: “the achievement of a certain level and kind of literacy, mathematical skills and abilities, and the internalization of an individuated and self-knowing identity is the responsibility of the learner” (Bialostok and Whitman, 2012: 13). Skill, knowledge, and self are thus folded into one another, but they also erase the social, cultural, economic, political, and historical contexts while highlighting privilege subjective, human qualities as embedded in the minds of particular free-market individuals. For example, Urcioli (2008) provides a careful and powerful analysis of what she terms the “skills discourse” of the corporate, neoliberal workplace. These skills become fetishized in the corporate context both in terms of the social construction of productive, marketable smartness and as constitutive of a particular kind of person that “embodies” the company (Urcioli, 2008: 213). Skills, however, are imagined not as ways of knowing, but as things possessed by individuals which, in turn, positions the educational process as one involving a market transaction: tuition dollars for discrete commodities (i.e. skills). In the case of “soft skills” such as “leadership,” “communication,” or “team work,” highly complex social dimensions are erased in favor of simplistic models of discrete skills: Soft skills are what Michel Foucault (1988) calls “technologies of self,” ways to fashion subjectivity compatible with dominant practices, institutions, and beliefs. They establish the type of person valued by the privileged system in ways that seem natural and logical, they constrain what counts as valued knowledge, and they demonstrate willingness to play by the rules and belief in the system (Urcioli, 2008: 215).
Among the most privileged groups, risk is something that is constantly and consistently managed from childhood to entry into the labor force. For example, Lareau’s (2003) seminal work on “concerted cultivation,” describes how middle-class and affluent families spend tremendous amounts of resources and time in building the appropriate skillsets and on the acquisition of symbolic capital for their children: piano lessons, organized sports, and carefully scripted lives are built into this approach to parenting. Such concerted cultivation could be understood as a sort of attempt to manage their children’s future. Similarly, Kusserow (2003) highlights how class impacts the cultivation of different types of individualism across three pre-schools. The most affluent children are granted a greater degree of self-authority by parents and schools at a very young age. Schooling for the affluent children was about “finding themselves,” while for working-class children, it centered on internalizing the authority of the school so that they would discipline themselves. Others have also examined the ways in which different knowledge and ways of knowing become implicated into the fashioning of neoliberal subjects––erasing some realities and highlighting others as laid out by Comaroff and Comaroff (2001). It is not difficult to imagine the children described in Lareau (2003) and Kusserow (2003) growing up to become the high-achieving children of Demerath (2009), as described above.
The privileged lives of education and work are further elaborated across other moments of the lifetime as we imagine the children described by Demerath (2009) becoming investment bankers. Ho’s (2009) ethnography of Wall Street investment banking emphasizes the social construction of smartness and privilege as justified by intensive work experiences for new employees. Ho (2009) highlights how the “culture of smartness” of Wall Street, however, is not only a way of seeing but a form of currency implicated in practice and ideology: an assemblage of individual traits (mental, biological, and material) that invest the individual banker with symbolic capital and even affect how decisions are made. It includes the sort of personality traits that Demerath et al. (2008) describe; the skills and competencies that Urcioli (2008) describes; embodied ways of being, including being male, Caucasian, ways of talking and walking; and material markers such as dress, fashion, and consumptive practices (Ho, 2009: 40–41). For example, an African American woman with readily apparent skills and competencies felt marginalized in the workplace because she chose to attend Spelman (a historically black college/university) even though she could probably have attended a more traditional, elite university.
The investment bankers in this setting were subject to the risks of the economy, and imposed their precarious understanding of labor practices onto the business operations of those entities that they encountered. Thus, the skills discourse is critical to positioning in neoliberal spaces of work and schooling, and is also always informed and shaped by more nuanced, situated realities that are erased or hidden, from race to decision-making. The neoliberal spaces and practices described have implications for what self and personhood mean within the context of work, and what success should look like.
In contrast, Walkerdine (2006) finds a deep sense of guilt among professional women with working-class origins who have experienced a degree of economic mobility. Walkerdine (2006) argues that the border crossing into middle-classhood requires constant, anxious-laden work that pushes them into a liminal space where the working class has been abandoned and the middle class requires constant justification, and where they can never quite feel safe: they are always at risk. Thus are personhood and self differentially experienced and configured by these discourses––particularly when they have not been normalized since childhood. The anxiety of Walkerdine's participants, however, is erased as a response to socio-economic realities, and instead: “normalized so that they are understood to be simply psychological characteristics such as ‘resilience’ or ‘flexibility’ or as having ‘transferable skills’” (Walkerdine, 2006: 23).
In this article, I am focusing on how neoliberal understandings fashion the self that is cultivated through college recruitment activities/marketing materials to manage future risk. It is clear to me that the neoliberal discourses around higher education attempt to provoke a certain sense of self. Epistemologically, however, I am reluctant and even skeptical about making claims regarding the internalization of certain identities and/or subjectivities. I find it likely that on some occasions internalization happens, and on other occasions, it does not; however, I argue that there are socially enacted subjectivities that operate regardless of whether or not internalization takes place, and these enactments are of central importance to this article. What is important in this dialog is the implicit understanding of knowledge/skills as commodities as they become folded into a sense of personhood––in this case, an aspirational personhood at the center of a future fantasy of success. The focus on the fantasy of success is not to indicate that individual students at Ravenwood are unable to achieve forms of neoliberalized success, but rather to parse out the ways that that possibility of success is mobilized as the result of investment choices (in time, labor, and money) while other elements of success are erased. Furthermore, I do not wish to suggest that the students’ position in the social structure will mechanically determine their future positions and rob them of any form of agency. As is the case with any good ethnography, my goal is to depict cultured agents moving through structures. This study focused not on the prospective students but on what the faculty and staff at Ravenwood do to impact those prospective students’ decisions. And, although Ravenwood could not be held culpable for the creation of the structural conditions in which such decisions needed to be managed, it was clearly drawing on strategies that did not challenge them.
Of course, this financial and temporal investment in higher education has implications beyond Ravenwood, as higher education is often framed in public discourses as a “good investment” because of the potentially transformative nature of the space on many levels. College is a central symbolic construct in the American imagination: a largely affluent space where one undergoes transformation from adolescent to adult, from student to professional, from legal minor to citizen. It is a guarded and gated space, where we solidify our political positionalities, encounter intellectuals who transform our understanding of the world, or explore our gendered identities. It is a temporal space for the middle-class and affluent child to “find” him or herself, where each individual can craft his or her own discrete identity, fulfilling the promise of Kusserow’s (2003) pre-school individualism or Demerath’s (2009) high-achieving children. Charts and graphs demonstrate for us that those who obtain certain credentials will produce far more financial capital over their lifetimes. In fact, full-color flyers were kept on hand at Ravenwood that showed in a bar chart how much income one could expect to produce over a lifetime as one moved up from high school to professional degree. It was another part of the persuasive argument to enrol. Thus attending college can be understood as an investment toward the future: one spends a tremendous amount of money with the understanding that there will be significant financial returns.
Despite the evidence that completing an undergraduate degree is still a powerful predictor of earning power (Carnavale et al., 2011), the public’s confidence in higher education has been shaken. In the current economic climate, even the strongest candidates find it difficult to transition into marketable products, and largely because of the potential for massive student loan debt, calls have been made on the millennial youth to completely forego higher education. 5 In the non-peer reviewed, discursive Wild West of the internet, endless blogs, articles, comments, lists, and advice columns suggest that higher education is too high risk, a scam, and a conspiracy. Multiple articles and authors in popular magazines and newspapers have addressed the question (see, for example, Indiviglio, 2010; Weissmann, 2013), and in May 2013 even Michael Bloomberg, media magnate, billionaire, and former mayor of New York City, advised the general public in his radio address that a college education was not worth the investment for most people, and that becoming a plumber would be a wiser investment of time and money (Fermino and Lemire, 2013). Even scholarly work has brought into question the value of higher education, as in Arum and Roksa (2010), which draws on broad data sets to show that students are not learning much in terms of critical thinking skills. This suggests that higher education is a trade invested in credentials, not learning––a position explored in everything from Moffat’s (1989) ethnography of college dorm life, to Stevens’ (2007) ethnography of elite college admissions. It is in this climate that colleges and universities have experienced even more pressure to manage the high costs associated with education, turning to a variety of strategies to address a perceived (or manufactured?) crisis in higher education. Thus today college recruiters have their jobs cut out for them. Although higher education still holds its place in the popular imagination, it is now somewhat tainted by an imagined future of oppressive student debt and questionable value. There are certain paradoxes to US views on higher education. Among these are the results from the Pew Research Center (2011), which found that: “A majority of Americans (57%) say the higher education system in the United States fails to provide students with good value for the money they and their families spend. An even larger majority—75%—says college is too expensive for most Americans to afford. At the same time, however, an overwhelming majority of college graduates—86%—say that college has been a good investment for them personally.” College recruiters must therefore paint a picture of a future that potential students can aspire to and in which such debt seems manageable.
Enter Ravenwood College: the private, non-profit, urban, four-year institution where I completed an ethnography of college admissions from 2008–2009. Ravenwood was a progressive institution with a mission guided by the promotion of social justice. Historically, Ravenwood had served a non-traditional student body: working-class, African American women. Nonetheless, perhaps even more so than in elite institutions, the recruitment activities and materials used at Ravenwood made explicit connections between particular skills and personal, economic success. In the following section I show how Ravenwood staff deployed images, media, and materials in this way.
Aspirational media
Ravenwood College ran a series of TV spots on the cable television networks that received some positive responses from prospects and seemed to be generating some inquiries. As with much advertising, the commercials blended fantasy and reality. The Assistant Director of Admissions, Madelyn, reported seeing one such commercial while watching the National Geographic Channel. The commercial was sandwiched between a show about legalizing marijuana and another about the abuse of crystal methamphetamine. Though not aired in the best context, the crowd of admission counselors hung on Madelyn’s words as she described seeing the spot come on. The one-minute spot had faces of serious and grave, young-looking African Americans with voice-overs giving excuses, followed by a narrator in response. It begins: I don’t have time to go back to school: A still of a young woman’s face Yes you do!: From a cheerful narrator’s voice I can’t afford to get my degree: A still of a young man’s face Yes you can: From the same cheerful narrator
The scenes were all filmed on campus, but when a crowded hallway showed attractive, young African American, Caucasian, and Far Eastern students walking together and laughing, it was clearly scripted. Actual student scenes all took place in classrooms and tended to feature older, African American women. In my experience on campus, when diversity was spoken of at Ravenwood College, it was in the context of recruiting more non-African American students. The diversity demonstrated in the commercial did not accurately represent the student body’s diversity unless one counted students from two other associated institutions, which I call “Atlas” and “Geschaft.”
Because Ravenwood College primarily offered courses in the evenings and weekends for adult students, and had limited course offerings during the day, the administration decided to sublet space to two institutions in order to produce some income from their space during daylight hours. These were the Atlas Language Center and Geschaft College. During specific seasons and times, international students would fill the halls of the college, giving the illusion that Ravenwood was more racially/ethnically diverse than it really was. More importantly, the classes were also segregated.
At night, the majority of classes were filled with predominantly African American and, to a lesser extent, Hispanic students. During the day, the tall, young, mostly blonde, German students of Geschaft College would be taught by their own instructors in their own classrooms. Atlas Language Center students were largely from East Asia, Europe, and Latin America and were likewise taught by their own instructors in their own rooms. If one walked the college hallways in the evening, one would encounter an entirely different population. One admission counselor revealed that a student complained because she had been given the impression on an admission tour that the college was more diverse than it really was and was unhappy to be in classrooms with “all African American students.” In conversation, the admission counselor bemoaned this Caucasian student’s implicit racism but did not carefully interrogate the institutional role in producing the situation. The television commercial seemingly reflected some of the diversity if one included Atlas and Geschaft, but on the whole, a complex social landscape was erased in the television spot in deference to a racially diverse fantasy of Ravenwood College.
A number of staff who worked with the Office of Admission made an appearance in the television commercial: Dean of Admissions, Karl Levitz, was talking with a student in his office; Andrei, the admission graphic designer, was reading in the library; admission counselor, Nadira, was laughing; and Professor Pedicini was talking seriously. During the remainder of the spot, the narrator mentioned the speed of degree completion, the granting of financial aid, the convenient location (there were a few shots of the main entrance and the trendy neighborhood), the evening and weekend coursework, and the school’s contact information.
Ravenwood’s catalogs and TV commercials portrayed not only fantasies of diversity but working-class fantasies of affluence (see Shumar, 1997) that evoked possibilities for prospective students. I found many of the images in Ravenwood’s advertisements, flyers, catalogs, and related literature to be somewhat typical of institutions like Ravenwood and, at times, even difficult to distinguish from its competition. Like other colleges with strong career and vocational orientations, lower selectivity, and which were generally less-elite, the literature was filled with images of attractive, young, professional looking men and women (mostly African American) working studiously over a desk or engaged in deep conversation with an older person (likely imagined to be a professor or tutor). All of the various marketing literature was filled with smiling, happy, attractive faces. And like the TV commercials, models were blended into the brochures with actual students and faculty. Many advertisements that I noted on buses and bus stops in the region were essentially made up of a few such smiling faces with text describing Ravenwood’s programs, and the advertisements were not really distinguishable from the advertisements of Ravenwood’s competitors at the same bus stop. Other photographs in the literature depicted the city in which Ravenwood was located in a way that was reminiscent of a travel brochure: aerial images of the historic city center, the sun rising over the cityscape, a trendy gallery, and other tourist attractions. What distinguished all of these representations, however, was that they depicted the student as a certain kind of person: a neoliberal agent making choices and investments. The narrative found in the marketing literature reduced the individual’s entire future to a choice about attending college.
Other similar TV commercials from Ravenwood included young African American actors and actresses sitting at bus stops or on benches and being approached by their future selves wearing professional business attire. These professional selves had returned to the past to persuade the present selves to attend Ravenwood. Another such commercial literally suggested that students would earn more money, have more respect, and a better future if they attended Ravenwood. The school was presented as the mechanism through which a specific kind of personal success and mobility could be achieved, a technology for managing prospective students’ own risky futures.
The “imagined” or “fantasy” students in these commercials conform to the high-achieving identities described by Demerath et al. (2008), including: (a) an awareness of competition in the marketplace; (b) an emphasis on control of self-authorship; (c) individual confidence; (d) advocacy for self; (e) an attachment to success; and (f) a self-conscious cultivation of work ethic. The advertisements were inhabited by exactly these sorts of neoliberal subjects, while erasing socio-political history, race, gender, and economic disparity. Such advertisements also very much fetishized competitive individualism and ignored structural conditions or constraints.
Of course, Ravenwood, a small, relatively obscure college, was in no position to challenge cultural and social mores more broadly. It had been disciplined by the marketplace and bore the brunt of its economic downturn with layoffs and campus closings. All they could do was insinuate their own role in the individual’s self-as-future project.
Andrei, Ravenwood’s in-house graphic designer, worked hard to portray Ravenwood in a certain way and to insinuate certain feelings about Ravenwood into the general public. In the spring, he designed a simple Ravenwood logo that appeared to be entirely woven from grass with a single daisy. Another image had a flock of ravens hazily forming the Ravenwood College logo. Andrei was always busy doing graphic design work for nearly every department in the college, from commencement programs to workshop flyers. Many of his images adorned the TV flatscreens announcing events around campus, but few made it to the public marketing campaigns. Unlike the advertisements and commercials, these drew on comforting or pleasant imagery (as in the creative iterations of the logo described above) without suggesting any particular aspiration.
Andrei, who was also a Ravenwood student in an MBA program, worked closely with the advertising agency and was pleased with the current marketing campaigns for the college. He felt that the advertisements looked clean, had a clear and simple message, included a diverse set of people (in terms of age, ethnicity, etc.), and overall looked like a university. He had seen some advertisements for Ravenwood’s competition that did not look like a college at all––they had all the gravitas of an advertisement for a “foot doctor.” In contrast, he thought that the current marketing campaign drew upon the “Yes We Can” spirit, energy, and optimism, which was still at a high after the Obama election. On the website and in literature he had worked to eliminate what he called the “flashy” or “gimmicky” images, such as blinking “Apply NOW!” buttons. Very often, he would be heavily involved with the advertising agency, liaising between it and the Dean of Admission on various images.
The challenge for the advertising agency and Andrei alike was to package education in imagery that Andrei acknowledged as intangible. He wanted the college to have a certain brand. He wanted people to look at an image and get a certain feeling of comfort and then associate that feeling with Ravenwood College. For example, to capture the accelerated nature of the programs, Andrei designed a series of images that drew upon traffic signs: taglines on a bright yellow traffic sign suggested both speed and an urban setting. For the Dean of Admission, the advertising was aspirational. He wanted prospective students to look at the image and aspire to be part of it. Not only did he want the prospective students to colonize their own future but to see Ravenwood College as an essential component in bringing about that future.
The cultivation of ‘brand’ operates to both provoke a bundle of semiotic relations and activate in someone movement toward participation in the institution. Colleges and universities cultivate ‘brands,’ which involves a coherent relationship between instances of brand (or tokens), and a brand identity (or type) given the broader legal and cultural framework that makes such notions meaningful (ontology) (Nakassis, 2012). As such, the brand relationship is constituted by “the ongoing articulation between brand tokens, a brand type and a brand ontology. Minimally, the brand relationship holds when there is a sufficiently tight calibration of these various levels (token-type-ontology)” (Nakassis, 2012: 628). Or more simply, it is an institutionally constructed set of symbols designed to index certain meanings and associations in the general public given the cultural context.
In traditional industry a tangible product (token) is fashioned and consumed in ways that (ideally) align the product itself with the desired corporate identity. People purchase the tokens which are then folded into their narratives about who they are, even if only in a very superficial way (this shoe is an instantiation of Nike, which aligns with my identity). In contrast, I would argue that the token of higher education is not some material product, nor even commoditized forms of knowledge that is imagined as material, but rather a future version of the student him or herself; the consumer is the token, or rather will be. Thus a particular instantiation of the “Harvard” brand is the “Harvard” alumnus. Although any brand engages in fashioning a particular fantasy about oneself, the brands of universities are fundamentally more powerful and deeply penetrative in that through the process of consumption a student literally becomes a token of that university. These tokens then become a part of the recruitment effort, and are folded into persuasive scripts about success and achievement for bringing in future generations of students.
Ravenwood drew on an assemblage of mediatized images and scripts that cultivated a neoliberal vision of personhood, profession, and success to which prospective students were expected to aspire. The media, images, and texts explicitly connected that vision to Ravenwood vis-à-vis the choices prospective students made about attending Ravenwood. Other features of economic and social success, such as race, class, and gender were erased as meaningful. In the following section, I draw parallels with the ways in which faculty and staff talked about these possibilities during open houses for prospective students. I consider two such events: the first is the Cambia Tu Vida (“Change Your Life”) event, which featured two speakers who used different persuasive strategies that provide an important contrast; the other event, which targeted homeless persons as prospective students, underscores the role of college recruitment in producing aspirations that can assail any circumstances.
Aspirational talk
Ravenwood’s Cambia Tu Vida recruitment event had all of the most obvious and essential markers of Latino culture, including a live Latin band and delicious Latin food. In fact the food was so delicious, and staff members were so busy snacking and chatting around the catered meal, that even when prospective students arrived staff practically ignored them, leaving them to wait awkwardly for the open house to begin. Sometimes the messaging at Ravenwood was not meticulously scripted.
After a particularly prolonged moment of anxiety where several admission representatives argued among themselves about who would initiate the session, the faculties from the two major schools were introduced. Although they overlapped in their messaging in many ways, each of them drew on different primary strategies for connecting to students and for provoking aspirations.
Dean Martinez of the School for Social Work began. She spoke in broad generalities about the available programs in a way that emphasized a few features. First she emphasized the tight cohort nature of the programs along with a few catch phrases from the college. She then referenced and deployed identity politics scripts as a successful woman of Puerto Rican descent. She mentioned that the college had “people like yourself,” and she explained how proud she was at graduation when she saw “people like us” getting their diplomas. She specifically mentioned President Obama and Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor several times. Finally, she emphasized that the goal of the college was to help students “move up and move on.” Her tone and manner were somewhat flat and the themes became repetitive. She did not describe courses, programs of study, career opportunities, or alumni stories.
In contrast, Professor Bhatt of the School for Business and Technology was a dynamic and entertaining speaker. He began with a brief statement about the current state of the economy layered in the jargon of economics and business management, and then said evenly: “If you understand what I just said, then you don’t need to come to Ravenwood.” He then asked the audience what percentage of businesses failed in their first year, which of course they underestimated. He then asked why it was that such businesses failed. Bhatt echoed Urcioli (2008), by saying that individual business owners did not have the core skills and knowledge required to let those businesses succeed. These were among the skills and knowledge that Ravenwood would offer; and Bhatt went on to describe other such examples. Water, he suggested, was essentially all the same. Whether it came from a tap or from a bottle, it was H2O. And yet professional business people had successfully utilized marketing and branding techniques to persuade various markets that there was a substantial difference between one bottle of water and another, which led to a need to pay differential prices based upon such differences. This was genius, he felt, and was representative of the skills and knowledge they would acquire as business students in Ravenwood.
Professor Bhatt’s talk was far more persuasive. In fact, during the Q&A portion of the open house, a number of students said that they had arrived planning to study social work, but that after the talks they were considering studying business. During the event, both Dean Martinez and Professor Bhatt suggested that it was not important to decide on a major at that moment, rather to resolve to go to college. Nonetheless, Professor Bhatt whispered to me later as we left the open house that Dean Martinez was going to “kill” him indicating that he also perceived his talk as having been far more persuasive. To a degree, the attractiveness of business over social work reflects the particular strengths of the speakers involved, but several features of the talks, given the responses of the prospective students, are also suggestive of how race and ethnicity are openly spoken of in the context of aspiration and education.
Professor Bhatt was descended from the South Asian diaspora of the Caribbean, but he did not explicitly talk about his ethnic subjectivity. He emphasized instead neoliberal notions of skill, knowledge, and self. Like Dean Martinez, his talk suggested the possibility of movement and success, but he never explicitly identified this possibility as connected to a particular class of person although the recruitment event was designed to target prospective Latino students. In contrast, Dean Martinez’s emphasis on identity politics did not mobilize neoliberal themes and did not seem particularly well-received.
Although he also did not describe courses, programs of study, or alumni stories, Professor Bhatt did deploy a number of the scripts that cultivated a neoliberal subject in Ravenwood aligned with middle-class, individualist models for achievement, and engagement. As described in Giddens’ (1991) work, the modern subject is encouraged to embrace risk and risk-taking as a fundamental aspect of self not only in the present but as a way to “colonize the future.” Subjects are required to control and discipline themselves as they take authority of their lives. Demerath (2009) described self-ascribed authority: “as a kind of reflexive feedback mechanism that justified and reinforced students’ identities and practices, including their aspirations and achievement orientations” (Demerath, 2009: 87). Students in Demerath’s (2009) study who were less inclined toward such orientations were from less affluent or minority families and felt marginalized and alienated by a school culture that so focused on hypercredentialism. The myth of a color-blind, modern America is tied up with neoliberal understandings of the competitive, objective marketplace as the only meaningful context in which agents make choices. Even the political discourse of hope from President Obama’s initial election campaign never explicitly engaged the candidate’s experience with race and ethnicity until it became politically necessary to address his association with Pastor Jeremiah Wright. However, despite its unspoken-ness, his position as a viable, African American candidate for President was underlying the campaign on many levels. Thus race and ethnicity are ever present, but may only be deployed in very particular conditions and in strategic ways that do not contradict the hyperindividualism of the neoliberal marketplace. Professor Bhatt was seemingly familiar with the delicate social terrain in which the discourse of race/ethnicity could be deployed.
The stark contrast between one’s current position in the social structure and the aspirational scripts used in recruitment was perhaps best underscored at another recruitment event. Ravenwood partnered with a community organization that served the homeless and invited the organization’s clients to discuss educational opportunities. There were about five employees from the small organization and about 30 clients, and the discussion centered on a specific scholarship that would cover all expenses for those who completed the community organization’s program successfully. Professor Stubbs and Professor Bhatt were the primary speakers along with a financial aid representative (Cole) and a current student; admissions staff largely held peripheral roles such as welcoming guests and introducing speakers.
Professor Stubbs effectively engaged the audience by suggesting that the program allowed students to both improve the world and pursue a career at the same time. He said: “helping others is transformative for yourself.” He spoke mostly through vignettes about students he had known and said there was a “special spirit” in Ravenwood. The college and faculty, he said as he recalled former students as old as 60 successfully completing the program, acknowledged their life experiences and respected them as adults. He also briefly mentioned Obama and Sotomayor before moving on to talk about the Ravenwood literature and sample course schedules in the participants’ folders. Professor Stubbs described Ravenwood as a “special” place outside of the established social order where the possibilities for college even extended to the homeless. He drew connections between his audience of prospective students, who were adults and mostly African American, and individual models of success, through both local anecdotes (former 60-year-old students) and through successful minorities who had national prestige (Obama and Sotomayor). Professor Stubbs held an appointment in the School for Social Work, but his calling attention to powerful minorities was more persuasive than Dean Martinez had been at the Cambia Tu Vida event. It was also far more understated. Because poverty and race/ethnicity are often conflated in American contexts, Stubbs was able to draw parallels between prospective students and President Obama by erasing important differences such as Obama’s highly educated, international, and credentialed preparation. In this way, he engaged his audience and opened up the possibilities of success, achievement, and mobility.
Professor Bhatt spoke next about the economy with optimism. He suggested that there were always dips in the economy and that “we always manage to come out of it.” The Business Program, he suggested, would teach them how to take advantage of the boom that would inevitably come. As in Cambia Tu Vida, he asked for a show of hands on how many people wanted to own their own business (many went up) and then how many out of ten businesses actually succeeded. The answer was two, and he said that the other eight had failed because they did not know how to manage themselves. As the similarity in Professor Bhatt’s arguments demonstrate, individuals tended to acquire and elaborate specific ways of laying out persuasive arguments, which I refer to here as scripts. Although the details would vary from telling to telling, they held some consistency over time. In a similar way, Professor Stubbs did draw on some of the same scripts that Dean Martinez did (mentioning powerful minorities), but differently nuanced. Just as Professor Stubbs had called upon possibilities, Professor Bhatt stoked aspirations by opening up inclusive, professional possibilities through schooling. “Money will come,” he said to a group of homeless persons in a program potentially offering a scholarship to some of them. “There will always be someone willing to take a chance on you,” he continued, drawing parallels between both the possibility of the College granting access and a future investor offering money. College was bundled up with representations of possibility, aspiration, and success in which even the fact of homelessness was considered assailable. This is particularly stark if one considers the structural challenges and risks that one faces as a homeless person. Ethnographic works from Liebow (1995) to Bourgois and Schonberg (2009) demonstrate the brutal, isolating, and demeaning conditions of living on the streets, and for the homeless, it is far less likely that there will always be someone willing to “take a chance on them.”
Cole, a temporary tuition planner, spoke next about “how to make it work for you.” He described his job as one that empowered prospects to take control of their futures, and to ease anxiety about paying for a private college. He then took a number of questions from the audience. For example, he reassured one person that bad credit history would not impact their ability to get a student loan, and that financial aid had not been cut because of the economic crisis. This was followed by more specific questions about the financial aid process.
Finally, a young woman who had completed the program from the community organization and received the full scholarship to Ravenwood spoke about her personal experience: a testimonial. She talked about her understanding of what it was like to be homeless, her fear of going to college, and her stubbornness to keep working at it until she got it right. She said that she eventually realized that she was not “dumb,” and she told the audience that after some time, they would “fit in” like she did. She talked about her willingness to use the tutoring center and referred specifically back to Stubbs’ speech by agreeing that there was a “special spirit” to the place, that she had grown, and that they would learn to feel good about themselves. The student seemingly embraced the inclusive message of the previous speakers, and spoke to the personal transformation that she had experienced; she was the embodiment of these possibilities. She acknowledged that she had not had the symbolic markers associated with college when she had begun. She had not “fit in,” but over time and with assistance, she had acquired those markers. 6 The Dean of Admissions then offered thanks and discussed deadlines and exams to great applause, after which there was mingling, eating, and laughter. The promise of success and personal change was in the air.
In many ways, it is admirable and extraordinary that these two institutions (Ravenwood and the non-profit agency) would work to provide a post-secondary credential for those struggling with the reality of homelessness. However, these sorts of representations of possibility were neoliberalized “American Dream” sorts of stories. They did not question the structures that allowed the attendees to become homeless in the first place, or that might keep them that way. Rather, the speakers fully embraced the notion that a few of them could be provided with the opportunity (as an individual) to follow traditional paths to economic security (a college degree) with a little support from all sides. The American status quo remained unexamined. However, it is important to remember that this was not some philosophical dialog about mobility in the United States, but rather an attempt to persuade people to invest significant time and money in the institution. Ravenwood College was not inexpensive. At the time of this study, Ravenwood’s tuition rate was between $450 and $800 per credit, which translated into between $15,000 and $26,000 per year for most students (program dependent). Although this open house focused on a scholarship that would cover expenses for these homeless, prospective students, I had heard similar arguments before. They were part of the persuasive scripts that the Ravenwood staff and faculty drew upon regularly to recruit students. About 80% of students were willing to take out student loans to finance their education at Ravenwood College. These facts led to an inescapable question in neoliberal contexts: did the “special spirit” of Ravenwood merit the cost of attendance? The admissions team needed students to feel that the answer to that question was “yes.”
As with the media and advertisements, faculty and staff members talked about Ravenwood in a way that reinforced the neoliberal vision of personhood and success. Once again, possibility and aspiration were connected to individual choices about attending Ravenwood and would help the students to manage future risk. I argue in the following section, however, that the future selves and aspirations cultivated were porous and fluid ones. This result points to the flexible, marketable, self-as-project described in the neoliberal literature. Admission counselors all described an ethical boundary, a line between counseling and sales that suggested a degree of malleability in student aspiration, which in turn informs about the neoliberal marketplace.
The provocative space between counseling and sales
Implicit in recruitment to colleges and universities is the assemblage of ideas, professions and ways of knowing, and the fluidity of professional aspirations connected to these assemblages. As previously suggested, Ravenwood College was a progressive institution with a mission and history dedicated to promoting social change and empowerment for communities traditionally living in poverty. Because Ravenwood offered only a few, largely vocational majors for undergraduates, the question of fit for prospective students became far more consequential than in an institution with hundreds of majors. For me, some of the programs seemed to resonate very closely with the mission (as in education, social work, etc.) while others did not (as in business). My own training and values suggested that there was a contradiction between this mission and such academic programs, and I was not sure why an open house would “target” both areas of study at the same time. Both of the events described above demonstrated for me that among these prospective students, the contradiction between the mission of the institution and the academic programming were not necessarily contradictions for students. These prospective students could imagine themselves in a variety of professions––imagine a variety of selves populating the future. And for many of these prospective students, there seemed to be little contradiction between a self who was dedicated to providing counseling and services for poor families and a self who found an innovative way to persuade people to purchase bottles of water in bright packaging.
One way to interpret these findings would be that, as marginalized minorities, prospective students were susceptible to well-crafted arguments, i.e. that a smooth and interesting talker would be able to sway them easily from one way of thinking to another. This was important because there were few majors available, and thus someone may approach the college with an interest that did not align neatly with one of these. On occasion, admission counselors spoke about these processes in just this way, but I find it unlikely that being susceptible to persuasive arguments is unique to marginalized minorities. Rather, I argue that such persuasive scripts are deployed by offices of admissions across the United States and are critically important for college recruitment.
At Ravenwood, the ability to persuade prospects and students into different majors or programs was something that all admission counselors reported struggling with on an ethical level. Essentially, they all aligned the work they did and liked doing with “counseling” and distanced it from “sales.” This binary is articulated again and again in interviews. Admission Counselor Nadira, for example, was adamant that she could, but would not, do whatever was necessary to “make the sale.” She would not “convince someone interested in interior design that she should go into the Business Program because it is the same thing,” or that in order to “succeed” in interior design you need to have a background in business, and thus persuade a prospect to enrol therein. She would be clear to her students that there were no interior design programs. In her own words, she was not going to “turn rice into potatoes,” which was something that she associated with proprietary colleges, i.e. the range of higher education institutions that are for-profit and often structured as a corporation and publicly traded.
Nadira herself was a graduate of Ravenwood, who had completed studies in the School for Social Work and gone on to start a somewhat successful business. She had taken the position in the office of admissions because, as a Ravenwood alumna, she wanted to “give something back.” She reported that if she had felt the pressure to persuade students like that, she would have just walked away since she did not need this job. She would not mislead or “sucker” students into Ravenwood, and she did not feel pressure to do so although she could not say how other admission counselors felt. She saw her role as primarily career counseling, and what her students did was “allow me to dream with them.”
Aaron, another admission counselor, agreed. He suggested that he was not afraid to tell someone to apply somewhere else if he felt the applicant and Ravenwood College were not right for each other. He thought his priority was to be a counselor and not to worry about numbers, although he also expressed uncertainty about how other admission counselors felt; the hesitation to sell was something that they did not seem willing to openly discuss with one another. Louisa also agreed with these sentiments. She stated that if she worked with a student interested in nursing: Potentially, I could persuade that student to still apply here and do a bachelor’s in social work, because I can sell it, right? Because there is a sales piece, I can sell it you know. ‘With this (degree program) you can do this,’ and ‘you can do that (degree program) and go on to do this (career path).’
When admission counselors provoked aspiration in their prospective students, it was for a future self that was successful, but successful in what seemed less relevant. In this, Ravenwood’s students do not seem that different from the masses of college students thinking about their investment and their own futures in uncertain economic times. Ravenwood’s prospective students, fueled by popular discourses on mobility and success, were seemingly seeking a vehicle to take them there, and Ravenwood College was just such a vehicle. The “there,” however, was a fluid destination.
Urcioli (2008) described the ways that disparate and diverse skills were made commensurable within the market logic, both in terms of their market value and in the ability to acquire them as commodities. Further, the skills discourse is also penetrated by the logic of quantification, which fits in neatly with an understanding of education in the neoliberal marketplace. The deployment of quantification rhetoric becomes part of the loose association of terms in this register, suggesting that all these disparate skills are commensurable. Their commensurability lies not in explicitly comparable qualities but implicitly in the notion that they can be assessed and inculcated in the same ways. This presupposition of workers as a set of measurable capacities is, in effect, an update of the Enlightenment notion of an abstract human that can be segmented into pieces … (Urcioli, 2008: 217).
I am concerned here with how disparate personhoods and futures are made commensurable vis-à-vis the recruitment activities in which institutions of higher education engage. Nursing is then potentially like social work, interior design is like business, and even social work is like business in the sense that they each require the acquisition of unique skill sets, the investment of time and money, and they will eventually yield a dollar amount in future income. Therefore, all of these arguments resonate with the understanding of the neoliberal self as a future project, constructed to manage imagined risks. In order to be successful, institutions of higher education need to lay out arguments that fold themselves into the self-as-future project. For institutions with national recognition and prestige there is less need to articulate those arguments––they are implicit (almost ingrained) in the US mythology about success. For institutions that lack the symbolic capital, these arguments need to be laid out clearly for prospective students. The staff and faculty must be able to cultivate a space for the institution in prospective students’ imaginations. As Ravenwood had learned, failure to do so could yield disastrous consequences.
Conclusion
The desire for success and the drive of aspirations are not unique to the prospective students of Ravenwood College, nor is it only under the guise of neoliberalism that educational desire is enacted. In China and East Asia, Kipnis (2011) informs us, educational competition, differentiation, and desire emerge out of both encounters with the West (through processes of nation-building and industrialization) and also out of deeply entrenched traditions in which hierarchies are legitimated through state-sponsored examinations. Indeed, Giddens’ (1991) use of the “colonized future” did not apply to any iteration of neoliberalism, but to the condition of modernity. In this article, I am interested in how the colonized future becomes tied up with market logics and decisions in college recruitment––which is precisely how this work points to shifts in neoliberal frameworks.
One feature of life under neoliberal policy is the ongoing, economic condition of precarity for the majority of people who are expected to act as free agents and who are also free of loyalty to particular companies or particular geographic places. As exemplified by the investment bankers described by Ho (2009), neoliberal workers are idealized to be highly skilled, highly credentialed, and highly fluid. The investment bankers encouraged labor practices that turned workers into a fluid and disposable labor pool to keep the companies themselves “limber” and “flexible.” However, the bankers themselves were equally subject to rapid divestment and protected themselves in this precarious market by earning as much money as quickly as possible, and always positioning themselves for the next professional opportunity. In this cultural context, risk and precarity are the new norm to be fully embraced, but these bankers were cushioned from this economic reality by an arsenal of both financial and symbolic capital (i.e. MBAs from Harvard or Wharton). In fact, in an engaging interchange between Karen Ho and Andrew Orta, Ho (2014) points out that: “ … my current informants––retired corporate executives and managers who used to work in bureaucratic organizations that are now actively financialized––remark that companies today actually take less risk than they used to” (Ho, 2014: 36). Orta’s (2013) work focused on the ways that MBA students were socialized into a culture of acceptable risk-taking. The exchange between Ho (2014) and Orta (2014) further elaborated the debate about whether or not elites take meaningful risks, or if they are more interested in the appearance of taking risk in the current economic climate. One might conjecture then that financial executives today are more likely to deploy scripts about taking risk than they are to actually take those risks.
In contrast, very tangible risks infiltrated the world of college recruitment at Ravenwood. There was a very high turnover among admission counselors who needed to succeed in their tasks or risk both their own job security and the fiscal health of the entire institution. Unlike the majority of investment bankers that Ho (2014) describes, the admission counselors at Ravenwood were not naturalized into this economic reality. They did not embrace it and even felt an ethical tension in operating in such a space. This precarity can also be seen in the fluidity of aspirations that prospective students demonstrated at the open houses described above. Particular skill sets were understood as providing the same sorts of economic cushions the investment bankers drew on in Ho’s (2014) work. However, despite the scripts deployed to the contrary, it was not as clear that Ravenwood would provide the same skillsets or degree of symbolic capital that students obtained at elite business schools. Regardless, the entire framework through which these decisions were understood were market-based––a logical consideration given the cost of attendance.
Individuals make choices and decisions, but the neoliberal cult of the individual highlights these above and beyond any other contextual factors, which are rendered irrelevant or meaningless. Colleges and universities invented neither aspiration nor market conditions. But, in the current marketplace, they prosper when potential students entwine market logic with aspiration vis-à-vis their institution. Ravenwood College actively highlighted this connection for their potential students in both their recruitment materials and activity, while erasing meaningful economic, political, social, and cultural contexts. This was necessary to manage future institutional risk.
Although I do argue that the particularities of Ravenwood mediate the ways that these activities are enacted, I resist here a conclusion that positions Ravenwood as either exceptional or an aberration. For example, the ways that the political discourse of hope became entwined with recruitment scripts at Ravenwood may not be something that other institutions incorporate into institutional narratives, but I imagine that other institutions drew on other discourses relevant to their history, student population, etc. Likewise, when working with a prospective student who is likely to attend college, it is important to persuade an applicant to attend this or that particular one, and the finest mark of distinction is to be an applicant’s first choice. The early decision policies of many institutions serves to guarantee a seat in an incoming class at the applicant’s supposed top choice. If such applicants are accepted, they are, however, required to withdraw their applications from any other colleges/universities. Thus, within the neoliberalized framework of fetishized, competitive individualism, for an institution to be someone’s first choice serves as a point of pride, but it is also a way of managing the risk of future enrollments. At Ravenwood, the scripts that needed to be deployed were less about becoming the first choice among many institutions, rather about the decision to attend college at all. The project of intertwining aspiration and personhood with institutional narratives appear to be a key aspect of this process.
Attending to how these local persuasive scripts emerge from bureaucracies in relation to a historical moment is one way that ethnographic investigations can contribute to understanding how aspiration and identity become mutually entangled in institutions of higher education. It is also important to note that, just as individual students and institutions mutually reinforce each other’s symbolic capital, so too do aspirations become mutually entangled. Thus individual students are encouraged to see their future in terms of their relationship with Ravenwood, and administrative staff see the future of Ravenwood as being closely tied to its student profile. Institutions (including faculty, staff, etc.) become deeply entwined with their students (including prospects, current students, alumni, etc.) in an intimate dance to the tune of a future fantasy. It is a precarious dance with consequential missteps; but it is one that applicants and institutions must learn in order to avoid financial crisis in neoliberal times.
Footnotes
Notes
References
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