Constructing the Meritorious Student: Admissions Procedures and Their Categorical Effects at City College

• In Event: 207 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. Historical Trends and Policy Issues in Higher Education

Abstract

This paper brings together the tools of cultural sociology, institutional analysis, and historical sociology to trace how the abstract category of student “merit” has been constructed by how The City College of New York made admissions decisions. Contrary to a stable definition of merit based on expert educational judgments, the paper utilizes the concepts of organizational interests, institutional field and symbolic boundaries, to show the factors determining how City College constructed the “meritorious student,” and how the category came to be racially coded white. It shows how the racially coded-constructed definition of “merit” came to be the frame through which the public interpreted efforts to democratize access to City College in the 1960’s, and, in turn, understood such efforts, not as the realization of universal educational opportunity as a right of citizenship, but as a violation of sacred principles of meritocracy. As such, this paper is an institutional genealogy of the category of “merit” that shows how a significant abstract color-blind category, at the center of modern forms of life, came to take on racially coded and disciplining meanings.

Author

• Daniel Aaron Sherwood, New School for Social Research