Connecting Employee Perceptions of the Ideal Community College Student to Structural Barriers for Marginalized Students

• In Event: 21020 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 11: Educator Identities and Experiences

Abstract

Organizational structures and routines are imbued with normative ideology that conveys raced, classed, and gendered expectations of stakeholders. At higher education institutions, understandings of the “ideal student” shape organizational processes in ways that can maintain unequal outcomes even in the midst of equity efforts. To begin to unpack the relationship between ideology and organization-level structures and routines, this project examines how community college personnel understand the ideal college student. Drawing on interviews with 40 community college faculty, staff, and administrators at three Illinois community colleges, I show that participants conceive of ideal students as proactive, prepared, engaged, and unburdened. While the majority of interviewees prescribed to the same ideal, participants differed in their descriptions of responsibility for achieving the ideal. These differences correspond to variation in discussion of specific policy or programming interventions intended to support students. In particular, interviewees who emphasized that their institution shared responsibility for individual student outcomes were more likely to connect problems faced by students to resources made available at the school. This suggests that ideology is connected to discussion of policy interventions and the degree of specificity used to describe them. These findings illustrate the importance of tracing ideological impacts on equity-focused policies and programming.

Author

• Karin Yndestad, Northwestern University